Hopefully you enjoyed your time IN THE ROOM with Dr. Ben S. Bernanke. If you’d like to watch the conversation again, or if you were unable to join us, the replay is available for you to view until April 18, 2021. To access the replay:
- If you registered in advance: Please use the event link in your registration confirmation email.
- If you did not register: Use this link to register and watch the presentation.
- Check out our recap below
Dr. Bernanke fielded some pertinent questions from Cetera Financial Group's, Gene Goldman. The format was unique and a nice change from today's all too common zoom video conferences. Together they covered a wide swath of financial and economic questions, all with a bit of a baseball twist!
Our main takeaways were the current state of the US economy, and how the pandemic has affected the future economic outlook. Clearly the economy took a hit in 2020, specific industries in travel and leisure, restaurant and hospitality, and small businesses took it on the chin. At one point unemployment figures were around the 20 million mark. That's nearly the previous decades worth of jobs created. On a positive, personal savings levels are up displaying record levels. Both individuals expect consumers will methodically begin to spend in areas they've missed out on during shut downs, while the stimulus should help make the consumer financially more resilient.
Next they recapped the Great Financial crisis of ’08 - ’09. Dr. Bernanke studied the great depression throughout his career and used that knowledge to help him in making decisions in '08 - '09. Dr. Bernanke also described that during the great depression, “deflation” actually occurred, where prices of goods and services actually went down. In '08 - '09, they didn’t want negative inflation rates to happen, they wanted inflation low or near zero, but not negative in oder to insure that financial markets could function appropriately. The worst moment he experienced was the weekend Lehman failed, and AIG came close to failing.
The discussion continued on, and more economic insights were shared. Hopefully you enjoyed this tidbit of recap. Please join us for the next IN THE ROOM series on June 17th, the guest speaker will be announced soon!