Does Trump Have the Authority to Fire Fed Chair Powell?

Thank you, Avi. It is an honor to be back with you at the NBER Summer Institute. Thanks to you, Erik, and Catherine for organizing these insightful and thought-provoking sessions this summer. Artificial intelligence (AI) is advancing across the globe and permeating every corner of the economy at an incredibly rapid rate. This has significant implications for Federal Reserve leaders, both as policymakers and managers of the organization. AI is transforming the economy, including by accelerating how quickly we generate ideas and making workers more efficient, and that, in turn, will affect both sides of our dual mandate of maximum employment and price stability. AI also is beginning to affect the way we conduct economic research within the Federal Reserve System, with the potential to make some tasks more efficient, harness nontraditional data in new ways, and broaden and deepen economic analysis. I believe we are at an inflection point. As I have stated before, I, like some of you here today, see AI as the next general-purpose technology (GPT)2. As many of you in this room know and have written about, GPTs, like the printing press or electric power, matter immensely to innovation.3 Similar to those seminal advances, AI will likely spread throughout the economy more broadly, spark innovation, and improve over time. Among large language models (LLMs), the highest scores on benchmark intelligence tests have almost doubled over the past 12 months, according to the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index.4 The competition to improve is fierce: The leaderboard for the AI lab offering the best model switched six times in the past half a year. And the technology is diffusing rapidly. ChatGPT launched about three years ago, and now more than half a billion users engage with the internet-based LLM weekly.5 LLMs are super cool and grab the headlines, but there is a lot more to AI, which can be an important driver of productivity. Advances in multimedia generation is another way to think of AI's fast advancement. It took human creators decades to move from silent pictures to "talkie" movies; AI models accomplished this advance in less than a year. FED’S COOK MADE NO REMARKS ON MONETARY POLICY OR THE ECONOMIC OUTLOOK DURING HER SPEECH ON ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE.

Fed's Bostic: Economic outlook remains highly uncertain - WSJ. Fed's Bostic: The economy's tariff adjustment could take months - WSJ. Fed's Bostic: Rate cuts might be difficult in the short run - WSJ.