Witness Post: Jackson Hole
Located just south of Grand Teton National Park is the small city of Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Once famous for its annual fur trapper rendezvous, it is a town with a “wild west” tradition. At the same time it is seeking to shake off that bronco buster history and embracing a reputation as a magnet for global financial professionals.
Our daughter, Eleanor, moved to live in Jackson Hole for a few years after college. And she loved the mountain biking, technical climbing, and daily ski opportunities in this picture post card city. She never spotted a Fed luminary while serving as a waiter at the Silver Dollar bar. My wife and I visited our daughter a few times and believe it is truly a magical place. Afterall, it has the Grand Tetons as a backdrop, and the city leaders are still trying to shake off the antlers and cow town history. Eleanor loved her time in Wyoming and tearfully returned to Colorado for a masters degree at Regis University in Denver.
For the last many decades, the last weeks in August turn Jakson Hole into a mecca for the top financial wizards from around the globe. They all want to discuss interest rates, employment rates, inflation rates, and global economic trends. Annually, at this point, the city of Jackson Hole hosts dozens of central bankers, policymakers, academics and economists at its annual economic policy symposium. (In August, 2024 there were 120 attendees from around the world.)
Fed Chair Jay Powell (left) with Bank of Canada governor Tiff Macklem (centre) and BoE’s Andrew Bailey
Why Jackson Hole?
The first economic policy symposium hosted by the U.S. Federal Reserve started in 1978. Four years later (1982) the symposium moved to Jackson Hole, Wyo., in the northwest corner of the Tenth Federal Reserve District. Kansas City Fed President Roger Guffey invited then-Fed Chair Paul Volcker to attend the symposium titled “Monetary Policy Issues in the 1980s.” Volcker accepted the invitation and participated in the event, which, in the years that followed, was attended by his Fed successors and officials from central banks around the world. The city of Jackson Hole has fully embraced the annual end-of-summer visitors from every time zone around the globe. The scenery is spectacular and the winter ski crowd has yet to arrive. It has proven a great backdrop to discussions and communication.
August, 2022
The 45th year of the Jackson Hole Economic Policy Symposium gained media attention for having the most diverse attendance since it began – almost 30 percent of the symposium participants and more than 40 percent of the speakers were women. This was also the last year hosted by former Kansas City Fed President Esther George, who worked to expand the diversity of the event’s participants during her tenure. Chair Jay Powell applauded the Fed’s progress toward greater diversity at the Symposium.
As a recent article in Barrons, in August, 2024, states [1]:
Jerome Powell laid the groundwork for the Federal Reserve’s next phase of monetary policy in his speech Friday morning.
The chairman said he is ready to lower interest rates, citing a cooling labor market and inflation closing in on the central bank’s 2% annual target. Powell is confident that Fed will successfully thread the needle and deliver a so-called soft landing for the U.S. economy. It would be a rare feat, last seen in the 1990s. Getting there will require easing off from today’s high interest rates, Powell said.
His remarks all but confirm market expectations that the Fed will cut interest rates at the September meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee.
[1] https://www.barrons.com/livecoverage/jackson-hole-fed-meeting-powell-speech
Henry E. Hooper 