SPECIAL WSJ’s Take On the Week: How This Fed Hawk Views the Economy, Inflation, AI and Jobs

Bold Names

The Wall Street Journal

Technology

4.4 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 23 December 2025

⏱️ 38 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

As a special bonus, we’re bringing you an episode of WSJ’s Take On the Week. Co-host Telis Demos and guest host WSJ Chief Economics Correspondent Nick Timiraos are joined by Beth Hammack, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, to discuss the state of the U.S economy, interest rates and the central bank itself. Hammack shares her views on what she’s hearing from businesses in her district and what that could mean for consumer prices and the labor market. She emphasizes the importance of Fed independence and the chairman’s role in fusing differing viewpoints to create stable monetary policy. She also offers her perspective on the so-called neutral rate as well as artificial intelligence. If you like what you hear, subscribe to WSJ’s Take On the Week for weekly market previews and analysis. Visit our WSJ Podcasts YouTube channel or the video page of WSJ.com. Check Out Past Episodes: Inside Visa’s Tech-Charged Future: From Crypto to AI Why This Investor Says the AI Boom Isn’t the Next Dot-Com Crash This CEO Says Global Trade Is Broken. What Comes Next? Further Reading: Cleveland Fed’s Beth Hammack Skeptical of Further Cuts Let us know what you think of the show. Email us at [email protected]. Sign up for the WSJ's free Technology newsletter. Read Christopher Mims’s Keywords column.Read Tim Higgins’s column. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	As companies seek to close growing gaps in skills and talent,
0:04.0	Deloitte US CEO Jason Garzatus believes it's important for organizations to understand their baseline of skills.
0:10.0	There's so many organizations that can't ask and answer the fundamental questions about how much computer science or data management skills do I have or AI development skills in a given domain? By performing a
0:21.6	skills inventory, leaders can truly understand where their efforts should be focused. Being blind
0:26.3	to those gaps is the real miss. Visit Deloitte.com to learn how your enterprise can help successfully
0:31.8	cultivate talent. Hey listeners, Christopher here.
0:40.9	We've got something special for you today, the latest episode of WSJ's Take on the Week.
0:47.5	Our journal colleague, Tellis Demos, sat down with Beth Hammock.
0:52.5	She's the president and chief executive of the Federal Reserve Bank of
0:56.2	Cleveland, a bold name, if ever there was one. They had a fascinating conversation about jobs,
1:03.0	data, inflation, tariffs, the role of a Fed chair, and future interest rate cuts. We'll be back
1:09.3	with an episode of bold names later this week.
1:12.2	But until then, we hope you enjoy this conversation
1:14.4	and check out more from WSJ's Take On the Week
1:19.0	wherever you listen to podcasts.
1:25.4	Welcome back to another episode of WSJ's Take On the week. I'm Telestimos. We finally got another batch
1:31.2	of vital government economic data this past week, but what came out of it was a pretty mixed
1:36.5	bunch of signals. You had the unemployment rate rising unexpectedly to its highest level since
1:42.3	2021, but the number of jobs created beat expectations.
1:47.1	The consumer price index was a little lighter than people expected, yet Wall Street investors
1:53.0	are taking it with a grain of salt, as the journal put it in its coverage.
1:57.4	Now it's the job of the Federal Reserve to sift through all of this noise and figure out what should happen next with interest rates.
	...

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