WASHINGTON – As he drove past the intersection of 21st and E streets in Northwest Washington, a 68-year-old man peered through the window,struck by an encampment of homeless people here that grew from 10 tents to 20 in the past year. Then 30. Now 40.
The people living in those tents had no idea that their burgeoning village kept this man, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, up at night, or that he kept thinking about them as he drove two blocks south to his office. Powell doesn’t know their names or backstories, either. But what he saw was clear. A visceral reminder of the uneven economic recovery. Right there in the Fed’s shadow.
It’s in these brief interludes – when the most powerful person in the economy passes some of the most powerless – that Powell grapples with one of the most vexing economic conundrums facing the central bank, and the country, 14 months into the coronavirus crisis. How can the Fed have done so much – slashed interest rates, propped up the stock market, bought up $3.3 trillion in treasuries and mortgage backed securities – yet parts of the economy remain so broken?
Powell referenced the tent city three times in the span of seven days, including in a ″60 Minutes” interview and on a panel hosted by the International Monetary Fund. During a talk with the Economic Club of Washington D.C. on Wednesday, Powell mentioned the encampment again, saying the homeless should be part of any assessment of the economy’s strength.
“They need to be in the room with us as we make our decisions,” Powell said.
But there are no rooms at what advocates call “21st and E.” In fact, many of the people seeking shelter here have more elemental concerns. At the same moment Powell was speaking to the Economic Club, rain was falling on the encampment, and residents were scrambling to stay dry.
Malo and Isaiah, a young couple who go by the same last name, “Lotus,” and share a space no wider than a kiddie pool, draped a navy blue tarp over their neon green tent and reinforced the stakes into the mud. Monetary policy couldn’t have been further from their minds.
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由于疫情在2020年10,000月引发了大萧条以来最严重的经济危机,道琼斯工业平均指数在不到两个月的时间里下跌了2,000万多点。有几天,跌幅超过XNUMX点。
数百万工人在几周内失业。由于卫生官员拼命试图了解一种会导致至少 565,000 名美国人死亡的疾病,经济几乎在一夜之间陷入停滞。
鲍威尔动作很快。 3年2020月XNUMX日,美联储宣布紧急降息,XNUMX天后将利率降至零。到月底,美联储概述了一系列庞大的拯救金融体系的计划。
这些行动引发了 19,000 月底开始的股市大幅反弹,当时道指收于 34,000 点以下。近几日收于XNUMX点之上,分析师看好其连涨势头将持续。
鲍威尔因其对美联储的管理赢得了两党的赞扬,尽管在他担任美联储主席的三年里,华盛顿发生了很大的变化。当共和党控制国会时,唐纳德·特朗普总统任命他担任最高职务。现在,民主党掌权。
Powell’s four-year term expires in early 2022, and Biden hasn’t signaled whether he will renominate the chairman to another term. Powell declines to talk about his future in public remarks, but he has spoken bluntly about the state of the recovery. As one of the wealthiest Fed leaders, he’s now drawing attention to a homelessness crisis near where he grew up.
While the economy is expected to rebound strongly this year, Powell has urged people to pay attention to often overlooked corners of the economy. And he has warned lawmakers and others that something’s not quite right about this recovery. Many people are getting left behind, and that’s why he has mentioned the people at 21st and E.
The bleak reality comes with complicated questions: What more could the Fed have done to reach the most vulnerable during this recovery? And does this encampment’s growth, even indirectly, have anything to do with the Fed’s actions?
美联储有多种保护经济的工具,鲍威尔去年全力使用了这些工具。但这种干预对经济某些部分的帮助大于其他部分。
Slashing interest rates and backstopping corporate debt, for example, helped direct money into the financial system. Some of the biggest beneficiaries were wealthier Americans who hold investments. As a stark sign of how the rich got richer in the past 12 months, the number of billionaires on Forbes’s 35th-annual ranking grew by nearly a third, swelling by 660.
Claudia Sahm, a former Fed economist and now a senior fellow at the Jain Family Institute, said the inequality stems from the limitations of the Fed’s monetary policy tool kit. Low interest rates or asset purchases influence the macroeconomy as a whole. In the Fed’s efforts to quicken the recovery, Sahm said that “some of the problems they’re trying to solve, they make a little bit worse.”
“It’s not intentional,” she added. “They don’t like [Tesla founder] Elon [Musk] more than the worker at Walmart. But the reality is that their tools make him better off more quickly than the worker.”
The Fed, for its part, plans to keep interest rates low to allow the labor market to build strength, and the central bank isn’t ready to pull back on its other economic supports. Powell often points to the 8.5 million people – probably millions more – whose jobs haven’t returned since February 2020.
此外,鲍威尔经常警告国会不要过快宣布胜利。当选的立法者可以针对特定行业或经济领域提供援助,而美联储则不能。
The unequal recovery is also playing out in a turbocharged housing market as some buyers – flush with cash – compete for increasingly expensive homes. Some analysts worry that the housing boom could spiral into a bubble, which could trigger an even bigger mess.
当房价急剧上涨时,那些几乎无法支付租金或抵押贷款的人就会被挤出去。有时,这些人除了 21 街和 E 等地方之外无处可去。
“As long as you’re okay with bugs, as long as you have a tent and a tarp, it’s a lot cheaper than the cost of living,” said Malo Lotus, 19, who has lived at the encampment for about four months. “All the money you could put to rent, you could just save.”
The encampment is a patchwork of multicolored tents – the kind intended for temporary use, not permanent shelter. In some corners, there are snapshots of lives left behind. A stained mattress folded into a metal shopping cart. A bicycle with a mangled back tire. A discarded pair of pink underwear with white polka dots.
At the same time, many residents take pride in the community they’ve created. One woman nicknamed the organized row of tents facing E Street “Park Avenue.” There’s a trash pickup and a portable toilet. Residents routinely check on one another, distribute donated food and make trades, like a portable charger in exchange for a flashlight.
People come here for a few reasons, advocates say. The encampment is close to Miriam’s Kitchen, a nonprofit focused on ending homelessness, where residents can access services and get a meal. Some are drawn to the relative safety of the area, which is surrounded by gleaming government buildings and a heavy security presence.
But advocates say the coronavirus crisis is most responsible for the encampment’s surge. The virus keeps many people away from shelters. People who held stable jobs so recently had the floor fall out from beneath them.
Malo Lotus 过去每周至少在 Popeyes 工作 40 个小时。她和 21 岁的伴侣以赛亚·莲花 (Isaiah Lotus) 依靠这笔钱,尤其是为现在 10 个月大的女儿购买尿布。
马洛·洛特斯 (Malo Lotus) 表示,她去年暂时休假,因为厨房里只能有少数工人。当他们到达营地时,他们把帐篷安放在一堵墙边,这堵墙将他们与下面繁忙的街道隔开。
They are both trying to finish high school. One recent morning, Malo Lotus was working on calculus homework. Isaiah Lotus hopes to become a dance teacher or choreographer. Miriam’s Kitchen is helping them fill out paperwork to receive a stimulus check.
“I could see myself in any position, or a job that would pay me very well,” Isaiah Lotus said. “I would take a job where I can at least always be able to get there on time, have something to do. I would love it, to be honest.”
Jesse Rabinowitz, senior manager of policy and advocacy at Miriam’s Kitchen, said that on any given night there are 6,500 people experiencing homelessness in D.C., the majority of whom are Black.
“I agree with Chairman Powell that this keeps me up at night,” Rabinowitz said. “Homelessness is such a stark and visual reminder of the racialized income inequality in the city and in the country.”
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The Fed uses a wide dashboard of metrics to monitor the labor market. And recently, pressure has grown on the Fed to drill down beyond the aggregate unemployment rate, which was 6% in March. Economists note that the overall figure doesn’t account for major disparities in the jobless rate between White, Black, Hispanic and Asian workers.
Last month, for example, Black workers’ unemployment rate was 9.6%; it was 7.9% for Hispanic workers. The unemployment rate for White workers was 5.4%.
现在,经济学家们对一系列非常规指标感到困惑,以了解经济的复苏情况。商店的客流量有助于解释消费者的消费模式。移动数据显示人们呆在家里的时间以及离开家的时间。 Yelp 数据揭示了有多少企业关门了。
现在,美联储主席正在研究他车窗外无家可归者营地的发展情况。他对持续存在的粮食不安全问题表示担忧,因为数百万美国人仍然报告没有足够的食物。
These issues aren’t just captivating Fed officials in Washington.
Mary C. Daly, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, said the food bank lines near her home in Oakland are “an obvious sign the pandemic isn’t behind us, and the economic fallout from it isn’t behind us.” She said the pandemic rolled back progress that had been made to narrow housing and food insecurity.
“I think that it is really important, not just as an economist but as a policymaker, that the publicly collected data we can calculate doesn’t tell the whole story,” Daly said. “You need to talk to people. You need to walk around in communities.”
如何判断经济复苏在很大程度上取决于最脆弱的美国人的情况。其中包括人们在食品银行排队长达数英里,或者在 21st 和 E.
41 岁的马里奥·基 (Mario Key) 曾经通过 Uber Eats 优食赚钱,骑着自行车往返于马里兰州郊区和华盛顿送货。他搬回儿时的家照顾垂死的母亲,然后得知她的房子被取消抵押品赎回权。
After losing the house, Key said he was shot in the chest outside a McDonald’s in Washington. He survived, but could no longer ride his bike. He became homeless in 2018.
Key said he’s waiting to be approved for housing. He has one portable heater to cover his large brown and beige tent along one edge of the camp.
“I don’t know that he has much control over the city,” Key said of Powell. “One of the things I wish was that there would be a place for me to be . . . so that people have somewhere to be when they hit that bottom rung. People are starving.”
Compounding the Fed’s challenge is that many jobs lost during the pandemic may not return at all. The longer people are stuck outside the workforce, the harder it often is to get back in.
“There’s a lot of suffering out there still,” Powell said in the “60 Minutes” interview. “The economy that we’re going back to is going to be different from the one that we had. And in some ways, those differences will make it challenging for those people to go back to work. And I think we owe them helping them get back to work.”
最终,刺激资金的涌入将会失败。美国疾病控制与预防中心最近将联邦暂停驱逐令延长至 30 月 XNUMX 日。但倡导者担心,一旦这些保护措施消失,就会出现另一波无家可归现象。
“They don’t say this, but this is part of why Jay Powell and every Fed official has been begging for Congress to do more,” Sahm, the former Fed economist, said. “If Congress doesn’t do more, inequality will blow up, and we won’t reach full employment.”
At 21st and E, one woman sat facing her tent and sipped a soda. She said she had two jobs as an usher at some of Washington’s most acclaimed performing arts spaces before the pandemic.
She used to sleep outside on the campus of George Washington University but was displaced when the pandemic closed the school. She came to the encampment near the Fed and moved into a spare tent next to Key’s.
When asked, she said she was surprised to learn that Powell – someone with so much authority over the world’s economy – had noticed her community’s plight.
With a bit of hope, and a bit of disbelief, she said: “Maybe we could invite him to visit.”
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