Welcome everyone to Real Vision's The Interview. I'm Pedro de Costa and it's my pleasure to introduce to you today David Andal Fautup.

He is Senior Vice President at the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank's Research Department,

where he helps his boss, St. Louis Fed President James Bullard,

figure out what's happening in the economy

and what to do next with monetary policy.

He's also a very broad-minded economic thing. and what to do next with monetary policy.

He's also a very broad-minded economic thinker,

which is why I thought he'd be a great guest for real vision.

So thank you so much for joining me, David.

Well, thanks, Pedro.

It's a pleasure to be here.

So one of my jobs as a Fed reporter

is to kind of translate Fed speak to the rest of the world.

Real Vision is a fairly sophisticated audience

of investors, and so we don't have to kind of

translate terminology for for our viewers but I want to get into the Fed as an

institution and how you operate, especially at a time of such deep uncertainty as we are now, could you talk a little bit about how you go about looking at the economy and collecting data especially at a time where there's so little visibility and so much uncertainty about the outlet.

Well, that's an excellent question.

As it turns out, I mean, I don't do it personally,

but I have some very skilled colleagues who are kind of gathering

various data from data sources.

Home base, for example, is a real-time database on employment activity and

...