First Power Breakfast of 2025 provides economic insights

By Stephanie Meador, posted Feb 27, 2025 on BizFayetteville.com

Hundreds of decision makers and leaders from a variety of industries gathered this morning for the first Power Breakfast of 2025. The event featured a presentation from Tom Barkin, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, where he shared his perspective on key economic trends, challenges and opportunities in 2025.

Overall, Barkin remains optimistic about the current economy and he provided numbers to back this attitude up.

“The economy's in a good place. GDP grew 2.5% last year, that's a healthy number. Unemployment's at 4%. That's near most estimates of what is low, what a low rate would be. Consumers have jobs, real wages are growing, asset values are up, and with all that going on, consumers keep spending. We talked a lot about recession a year ago or two years ago or three years ago. You can't find anyone talking about recession today. At the same time, inflation's come down. The Fed's preferred method, the PCE, came in at 2.6% in December,” shared Barking during his presentation.

Although these reported numbers offer some comfort to consumers and businesses, there remains a lot of uncertainty especially in regard to things such as policy changes, geopolitical tensions and natural disasters. How can people predict the effect these things will have on the workforce, pricing, consumer spending and more? By using economic analysis experts can give their best educated guess, but with so many independent variables it is impossible to say for certain how things will pan out.

“History does give us some guidance…So as an example would be tariffs. We've got very good economic analysis that goes back to 2018 and 2019 and it says all those tariffs ended up increasing inflation by about 30 basis points, so 0.3%. And, plus or minus, I think that's a pretty good number. You’ll remember, there was a lot of inflation in 2018. But the policies this time aren’t the same as the policies in 2018…we don't know whether having been through the inflationary experience of the last three or four years, whether that means businesses are going to have more confidence to pass off these [cost] increases to customers, or if customers are going to be so frustrated with high prices they're going to have more energy to push it back. We just don’t know, and it’s tempting to try to spend a lot of time thinking all this out…But I prefer just to wait and see how the uncertainty plays out and how the economy responds,” reflected Barkin.

Following Barkin's presentation GFBJ Editor Faith Hatton served as moderator for the Q&A portion of the event.

The event was packed full of golden nuggets of wisdom for attendees to take with them and mull over as they continue to make important decisions for themselves and for their businesses. Our team at the Journal is glad to have been able to host Tom Barkin along with our collaboration with the FCEDC and the continued support of our sponsors. We look forward to bringing you another insightful Power Breakfast in June!

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