William C Dudley: Transcript of Fireside Chat at York College in Queens Transcript of a discussion between Mr William C Dudley, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and Dr Olajide Oladipo, Professor and Chair of the Business and Economics Department, during the Fireside Chat at York College in Queens, New York City, 24 March 2017. * * * Dr. Olajide Oladipo: President Dudley, can you please share with us the purpose of your trip here today to Queens? President Dudley: So, there are 12 Federal Reserve Banks around the United States, and one of them is the Federal Reserve Bank in New York that sits downtown in Manhattan, and near Wall Street. Our Second District consists of New York, Northern New Jersey, Fairfield County, Connecticut, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands. Haven’t gotten to the Virgin Islands yet. As part of our Mission, we want to represent the communities in our District, and so four times a year, I get on the road, and I go out to visit people, to find out what’s really happening on the ground. It’s meeting with businesses, meeting with people from educational institutions, going to visit manufacturing facilities, community development organizations. It’s really designed to do two things. One, explain sort of a little bit of what we do – like for example there, in the introduction, talking about this BIS. What the heck is the BIS? Well, BIS is a bank for central banks that sits in Basel, Switzerland.
Audience Member: Greetings, good morning to – or good afternoon to you and your guest. Now while it would be interesting to speak of why the New York Fed and the Atlanta Fed are differing on their economic forecasts, that might be interesting, but I want to speak to something far more local. Far more local. This community, and communities like this, were devastated, were ravaged – and I could use a stronger word – during the financial crisis of 2008. We’ve never recovered from this. The black community lost approximately 50% of its wealth in four years. 50% of the wealth accumulated from slavery till today lost in four years. No one, of course, was ever jailed for these things, no one was ever – very little punishment, if anything, was done. I understand that while you may want to do or feel strongly it’s not the purview of the Federal Reserve – I understand that. Using your researchers at Liberty and other parts of your organization, I need to know what laws that I can put on the books to protect communities like this. We’re about to go back into another phase of exotic mortgage-lending, and I will humbly differ with you on Glass-Steagall, of course. We’re about to go into another phase of exotic lending. They call it exotic lending. We call it predatory lending, and we pay for it. We can expect that again.