Speaking at the 2026 Just Economy Conference on April 15, Federal Reserve Governor Michael Barr sat down with the National Community Reinvestment Coalition’s (NCRC) President and CEO Jesse Van Tol. They discussed the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), AI in the financial services sector and the need to design a financial system that works for low- and moderate-income people and communities.Â
Speakers:
Michael Barr, Federal Reserve Governor
Jesse Van Tol, President and CEO, NCRC
Transcript:
NCRC video transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors. They are lightly edited for style and clarity.
Van Tol 0:07
Well, Governor Michael Barr requires no introduction. I’m sure all of you know him as one of the most important policy economic policymakers in the country, plays a critical role in setting interest rate policy and as a regulator, but we know Governor Barr as a champion of CRA not just for his work championing the 2023 CRA rule, but before that, as an academic, for his work at the Treasury Department in the Obama administration, championing financial inclusion. So a friend of the coalition, and I’m pleased to welcome you to the stage.
Barr 0:51
Thank you, Jesse, thank you. It’s really just a great pleasure to be with you, Jesse, such a wonderful leader of this coalition, and I have worked with NCRC now for 30 years, and I’ve just seen over the decades the incredible work that all of your members do all over the country in making our country a better place. So it’s just delightful to be here.
Van Tol 1:19
Thank you. We’re going to cover a number of topics today, starting with our favorite topic, the Community Reinvestment Act. Obviously, that’s an issue that’s near and dear to our heart, critical to our members. We’ve been on sort of a roller coaster ride, not just with respect to CRA but obviously a lot going on in the world today. But look into the future, we could rehash sort of what happened with the 23 rule, the agency’s proposal to rescind to the 95 rule. But as you sort of look ahead, the Federal Reserve was pretty clear, both yourself, Chairman Powell, who articulated that really the goal and the necessary outcome of CRA reform was an outcome that resulted in more, not less, investment in low- and moderate-income communities. So as you look to the future, what do you think are the key things the Federal Reserve is watching for now? What do modern CRA obligations look like a few years from now? A decade from now?
Barr 2:31
Well, you know, it’s a great question. I do think it makes sense to spend a little time on the history and then move forward. You know, when I was at Treasury in 1995, the agencies reformed the CRA rules to really focus more on outcomes and less on kind of process and paperwork, and that had a real effect of increasing access to capital around the country. But over time, as the financial services industry changed, those rules did not keep up with the kind of changes we had seen or the kind of great work that was going around in the country that needed more support. And so the 2023 rule was really designed to reflect those changes, to take care of issues around online banking, to provide clarity to community development financial institutions that they didn’t have to go through extra hoops to be qualified under CRA so banks could count on that kind of clarity to provide clarity on community development activities that qualified so more work could be done and less time was spent documenting that the work actually did what the local partners said it would do. Investments in rural areas were clarified. Investments in native lands were clarified so there could be more access to capital in native communities. And a whole set of reforms that were really designed to reflect these changes in the financial services sector, and as all of you know, unfortunately, the banking trade sued to block that rule, so we’re now in the process of going back to the 95 rule. But it doesn’t mean that we’re not thinking about what the kind of support that communities around the country need. That 2023 rule, I should say, had on the Federal Reserve Board Broad support. So what are the kinds of things that are important going forward? Well, one is making sure that banks and community groups can work together in a way that makes sense in their local community. So, staying attentive to the importance of local context in evaluating CRA. We don’t want to have an approach that is a one-size-fits-all approach. Every community works together in different ways. We want to make CR sure CRA is an effect. Active tool for that, as more and more lending is happening, not in the banking system, it’s important to think about the role of nonbanks in all of your communities. The Federal Reserve and the banking agencies don’t have the ability to change the application of CRA, but I think that’s an appropriate topic for Congress to think about. How should CRA obligations look in a world where there’s lots of nonbank lending, lots of FinTech lending going on? These are just some of the examples, but I would say, you know, the most important thing is the intentionality about it. That is, we can’t rest on the past. We can’t say CRA has done enough. All of you know that there are capital access needs in your communities that are not being met, and so I think you know it’s it’s most important that we as a country agree that the goals that we have, the shared goals we should have would be to making sure that homeowners have a chance to buy their first home, that small businesses have a chance to grow, that community development organizations have the capital they need to revive their communities, and if we can kind of work on building that shared goal as a society, maybe then we can start to think about the technical work that has to happen under CRA.
Van Tol 6:35
Governor Barr, as we see sort of an evolving financial services landscape, and this is not new, we’ve seen, obviously, over time, different segments of the of the banking sector have been disintermediated, new companies, new types of structures, money market, mutual funds, fintechs and the like. But today, we see more and more credit flowing through fintechs, crypto companies, private funds. Understanding that Congress would have to act to do something like applying CRA to different types of companies, how do you think about regulatory parity? How do you think about how we maintain sort of fair and equal standards as the financial services industry evolves? How do we avoid sort of a race to the bottom? You know, Chairman Powell said at this very conference that ‘like activities should have like regulation’, and yet we’re often sort of behind the curve, and you run the risk that a certain sector of credit sort of balloons and experiences difficulty and collapses, necessitating reform. How do you think about that? What’s the role of the Federal Reserve?
Barr 7:52
Yeah, you know, I agree that, you know, we should have a system where similar risks are policed and regulated in similar ways. It shouldn’t matter whether you’re a Fintech or a bank, you shouldn’t violate the fair lending laws. So there’s some pretty basic things, and the Federal Reserve has authority of two types in this area. And then I’ll talk about other agencies. The Federal Reserve obviously enforces consumer laws for financial institutions that we supervise under 10 billion in size, and we also do risk-based assessments of the largest banks to make sure that their risk practices for both safety and soundness and consumer protection are consistent with our standards. So that’s for banks. Then we also look at bank relationships with Fintechs. So if a bank partners with a Fintech, they have to comply with third-party risk management guidelines. What does that mean? They can’t just say, ‘Oh, the Fintech made me do it.’ The bank has direct responsibility for ensuring that if they have a Fintech partnership, that the Fintech is also complying with the law, is not marketing on a discriminatory basis, or is not failing to disclose information about terms of a deposit account or a loan. So that’s a second important way that we have a role. Now the third, most you know, third thing to think about is, well, what if you just have a Fintech operating, not in partnership with a bank? Well, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was created to create that level playing field between banks and nonbanks. The CFPB is the only federal agency that has the ability to supervise nonbank entities, and it’s the primary entity that has enforcement authority over nonbank entities, so to avoid the kind of race. To the bottom that you’re talking about. We need a strong partner in the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to do that. That’s, that’s sort of the system that was set up, and that’s, you know, pretty essential, I think, to having a level playing field so that banks and nonbanks alike compete, not on trying to trick customers in some way or not, trying to, you know, avoid their obligations, but compete based on the quality of their product and their ability to reach new markets. That’s the kind of competition I think we want in our society. And so I think it’s important that we have that strong partner to work with.
Van Tol 10:42
From a supervisory perspective, Governor Barr, you know, there’s been a lot of consolidation within the banking industry, but we’ve also seen companies coming in for charters, certainly at the OCC, the trend of stablecoin companies obtaining trust charters. We’ve seen a number of bank mergers. What kinds of community-level risks concern you the most when banks merge? We know that there are negative impacts. I think the Federal Reserve’s own research has shown that historically, some of the types of benefits that have been claimed by banks as a positive outcome of mergers have not necessarily come to fruition. That the sort of economies of scale don’t necessarily produce better pricing for the customer and for the community. How do you think about the public interest? How do you think about measuring how the community benefits and how to protect against harm in either the context of a merger or a charter?
Barr 11:55
Yeah, so let me, let me address each of those areas in turn. You know, on the merger front, we have a statutory lens that we have to look through for any merger that’s competition, financial and managerial resources, convenience and needs. So how are they affecting the community and, of course, competition. So we looked at all those things. If you have two entities merging, there’s always a risk that you’re going to lower competition in the market. And if you lower competition in that market, there’s a risk that prices will go up and the quality of services will go down. So competition is actually an important element in assessing whether a merger is going to actually help a local community or not. On the convenience and needs front, we’re looking at a couple different kinds of things. One is the record of serving the community in the past. So the most important thing there for us is: What’s the CRA record of that institution? And it’s not just the information that we get from CRA exams, but also, importantly, the input that we get from community-based organizations that tell us what’s been going on in that community, and that are important inputs into the CRA evaluation itself. So the work that you all do around the country, making sure that you know what’s going on in the banking sector and letting us know about it, is critical to that. And then we also look at the kind of performance that might be expected in the future, and there, I think we have a much harder time, so we don’t really know how the bank is going to act. And as you point out, there are examples where the result of the merger is less access than has been promoted. So one area, for example, where there’s quite good research is on access to small business lending. So one of the things that local banks do really effectively is relationship small business lending. They know their customer really well. They’re able to make loans that institutions that are more distant may not be able to make. And so one of the risks when you have a merger is that that local connection to the small business community is lost or diminished, and you might get less access to small business credit or there might be less competition for that. So that’s another that’s an important area to be concerned about. And also, if you lose that local connection, you might get less support for the local community development activity that’s happening in that area, as opposed to the broader reach of the institution. So that’s an area that we look at, but I’d say we have less insight into what the future is going to look like than the past performance, where we can say, ‘okay, this institution had an outstanding record of serving in community. That means it’s more likely to continue to do that in the future.’ If it has a record that was unsatisfactory, you know, I don’t know of a case where we’ve approved that. That kind of merger on the charter front, one of the things that I worry about when we when the agencies provide additional kinds of charter types is that not all the charters have the same regulatory and supervisory oversight. And so as we were talking about with respect to a race to the bottom before, you can get a race to the bottom, because there’s different oversight of different kinds of charter types, and that you know that, to me, is worrisome. In the in the context of the expansion of crypto activity, you want to be especially careful that the same risks in a bank that is chartered one way and a bank that’s chartered the other way are handled the same way. And if you get lower standards for different charter types that can provide less consumer protection, it can provide less prudential supervision, and so you might get new risk developing in the system that we’re not all ready for.
Van Tol 16:19
Absolutely. One of our concerns as well, I think, in this conversation about sort of stable coin usage, the Genius Act, some of the framework that’s developing around around cryptocurrencies is, is this question of yield, that you could see a flight of deposits out of the banking industry, which could either result in less lending or certainly it could result in less of a CRA obligation if we see that kind of flight. So, something that NCRC, obviously, we don’t always align with the banking industry, but we align on that concern. Shifting gears a little bit. You know, Congressman Foster laid out a number of pretty interesting issues with respect to AI. And as we start to see AI’s use expand in the banking sector, and we start to think about the potential for its use in credit underwriting, what sort of opportunities and risks do you see with respect to fair lending, and how do you think about your role?
Barr 17:29
Well, let me just say, first, it was wonderful to see Congressman Foster here to open up the morning. He’s been a great friend of community development, and I personally always learn a lot when I listen to Congressman Foster. He’s got just such a fascinating background and set of interests. I think artificial intelligence is generative. Artificial Intelligence is likely to be a significant force in our economy in the coming years. And so I think it’s absolutely critical that we grapple with its effects. That could be quite broad. I think in the long run, AI, like other technologies, is likely, over time, to make us a more productive society, and therefore allow us to have higher wages for people and if it’s handled properly, to bring everybody along on that journey. But you have to do it with intentionality. You can’t just assume that because there’s a cool technology, it’s going to help everybody. You have to up front be worried about and be focused on, how is AI going to affect the labor force? How is AI going to affect the financial sector? And focus your energy on making sure that it doesn’t push people back or just leave them behind. So that’s just big picture sense. So on the labor market side, we need to be investing. I think this is beyond our focus. But as a society, we need to think about investments in training, investments in education, investments in job creation that help people through what could be quite a disruptive transition. And on the financial services side, we need to make sure that the technology is used to promote access to credit and access to financial services. It could help in that regard, in terms of things like, right now people are using alternative cash flows as a way to improve access to credit, so generative AI might help in that regard. But you also have to be worried about the risk that generative AI because it’s soaked up all of the knowledge in our society is also soaking up all of the bias in our society and so generative AI might spit out outcomes that are just mimicking, reinforcing false claims about associative relationships that we have spent many of you in this room you know a lifetime fighting against. And again, you can’t take for granted that it’s going to be okay. We have to make sure that the models that are being trained are being trained on good data. We need to make sure that the models are not spitting out bad outcomes by looking at the outcome data. We need to make sure that when models are used, they can be explained so we don’t get an outcome that people say, ‘well, the model said, you know, this is just the model said it.’ That’s not a legitimate basis for making a decision under our fair lending laws. You’re not allowed to do that. So, you know, we need to be sure as regulators that there’s really strong model risk management going on in the banks. My experience thus far is that banks have been very cautious about using AI other than traditional machine learning for consumer-facing kind of decisional metrics, but we have to make sure that caution stays the same. And then when AI is deployed, it’s deployed with these clear guardrails in place. And if it’s done with the guardrails, as I said, it might be a way of enhancing access. We should be open to the idea that you can serve more people more cheaply, for example, using generative AI and that might improve access for people who banks saw before as not profitable enough. So there’s real opportunity, but you have to be careful and do it with intentionality.
Van Tol 21:40
You know, one of the things, really interesting, things that Congressman said, is, you know, potentially, every consumer now has, you know, the smartest consumer attorney, smartest financial advisor in their pocket. And one of the issues I’m not sure the banks are really thinking through, is that now in real time, you know, today, we attempt to detect fair lending and bias by sending in mystery shoppers and testers, and we look at data, but potentially, every consumer could, in real time, be sitting, interacting with a loan officer, recording it, feeding it into the AI and being told you’re being offered not the best loan. You’re being asked questions that are indicative of bias, and could draft and file the lawsuit or alert someone to that effect. And so we also think there’s potentially, you know, that kind of effect and that kind of thing to look out for. And then I think, on the other hand, it speaks to the need to have some standards around, sort of the public interest in AI. You know, in early days of the Internet, everybody thought it would be revolutionary and sort of in the ways of of creating more freedom for everybody. But as we saw over the course of the internet, the ways in which it was monetized became sort of less and less free and less and less open. And while today, many of the AI models are, you know, not fully monetized, you know, what happens in the future when the AI is not giving you an objective answer, but steering you to a product because it’s a paid offering, and so something we think about and worry about quite a bit.
Barr 23:30
And you know, again, I think this goes back to the point about intentionality. So we can’t just assume that it’s all going to be for the good. Now is the time to be focused on it, because AI is changing and growing very, very rapidly.
Van Tol 23:42
Absolutely. On the topic of disparate impact, Governor, you know, the CFPB issued new rulemaking around disparate impact, looking at eliminating special purpose credit programs, or at least discouraging them. Moving away from a disparate impact standard sort of saying discrimination must be intentional. And in fact, we heard from from the assistant secretary of fair housing, from this stage yesterday, his belief that that discrimination must be intentional to be problematic. How do you look at fair landing and what has the CFPB done on that front?
Barr 24:27
Well, you know, I’ll be careful on how to talk, but maybe I’ll just talk about the long history of the way those provisions have been interpreted. So you know, when ECOA was passed, the Federal Reserve at that time, had regulatory responsibility, and we issued a set of regulations that made it clear on all the issues you mentioned. You know, for example, made it clear that both disparate impact and disparate treatment approaches could be used under the law that was consistent with ECOA to do that to ferret out fair lending violations. And in my view, disparate impact has been a really important tool for understanding areas in our society where the practices and procedures put in place are facially neutral, but they have an effect that is really discriminatory, really exclusionary, and are not justified by legitimate business purpose. So that test balances, I think, really well, the importance of fair lending enforcement and the importance of giving financial institutions the room they need to run their businesses. So disparate impact and disparate treatment have both historically been really important, and when the CFPB took over rule writing authority from the Fed in 2011, it adopted that same approach. So there’s been a consistent approach on this for the history of ECOA, and this change would be a significant change from that approach. The same on special purpose credit programs. Special purpose credit programs have been around for a long time. A number of banks use them quite effectively to reach markets that they were not serving effectively before, and it found them to be really effective programs. So you know, and that’s been a long-standing interpretation under the law from the Fed and from the CFPB for many years. So I think, you know, those programs are really important to preserve. And the last area I’d mention is around rules around discouragement. You know, all of you know that it’s not just about when you sit at the table, how those negotiations go, or whether you get the loan or you don’t get the loan. There can be activity that a financial institution engages in, whether purposefully or completely obliviously, that have the effect of discouraging applicants from minority groups or from women from immigrant communities. And so it’s really important that we have strong rules that prevent unlawful discouragement. And that’s another area where I think it’s important to pay attention as this rulemaking proceeds.
Van Tol 27:27
Absolutely. Shifting gears a little bit, Governor, if you had a magic wand, we’ll engage in a little wishful thinking here. And you could fix one structural issue in the financial system to deliver, to better serve consumers, communities and small businesses. What would it be?
Barr 27:48
Wow. Well, I’d say one thing I’ve learned after a few decades in this space is there are no there are no magic wands. And you know, let me just start with the work that all of you are doing around the country. You know one thing I’d say, this is not a magic wand, but you know, the thing I think is most important is that your work is supported and bolstered and continued. Because, in my experience as a Federal Reserve Governor traveling around the country and before that, at the Treasury as an academic, is that the local organizations on the ground in a community make all the difference between success and failure. So if you want more people to get access to banking services, if you want more small businesses to grow in a local community, if you want more affordable housing, if you want more community revitalization, at the center of that, in my experience, there’s a local organization. It could be a community development financial institution or a community development organization or an advocacy group or a local sometimes philanthropy, but that is the glue that makes all these things work. So again, it’s not a magic wand, but I’d say, let’s figure out how to support your work more around the country,
Van Tol 29:29
Just as a follow-up, Governor, not a magic wand, but does the Fed need new tools? I mean, I think there’s sort of been this question, even with respect to interest rate policy, we’ve seen the Fed raise interest rates, and yet it’s not had quite the same effect, perhaps, as it has had in the past. We have our own views on that, that because of the scarcity of housing today in America, raising interest rates didn’t have the same impact on housing and housing prices, which in turn, didn’t have the same impact on a lot of people’s sentiment of how wealthy they were, that you didn’t really see home price declines in the same way that you see in the past, and so many consumers confidently kept spending and would continue to see inflation higher for longer, certainly not my area of expertise. But do you think that the Fed needs other tools, whether in the context of monetary policy or otherwise?
Barr 30:30
Well, let me speak first to monetary policy, and then we can maybe talk about that other areas. The Federal Reserve has the tools we need to meet our dual mandate goals of maximum employment and price stability. We have those tools. We can use them effectively. We pay very much attention, Jesse, to the issue you raised, which is, what’s the pass-through of interest rates into the economy? And so we are attentive to how financial conditions are affected by what we do. But at the end of the day, if we need to reduce demand enough to bring it in line with supply and bring inflationary control, we can do that. And if we need to support demand enough to bring our labor market up where it needs to be, we can do that. And it’s our responsibility, which we adhere to strenuously and assiduously, to meet those two congressional objectives and to use our tools to do that. So I don’t think on monetary policy, we need new tools. We need to continue to focus on the job we’ve been focusing on, which is bringing inflation down and making sure that there’s maximum employment. Now, the economy has been buffeted by a variety of shocks over the last number of years that make our job difficult. We had, you know, the COVID crisis, which was so devastating on a human level to so many communities and also fed into this problem of inflation. We had the war in Ukraine. More recently, tariffs increased prices, and now, right now, we’re seeing, at least on a temporary basis, elevated prices from the Middle East conflict. So we have to take those as a given. We don’t get to decide the world that we work in. The shocks come in and it’s our job to use our tools to do both those goals. And sometimes, like right now, they can be they can be intention. And so this is, you know, just reiterating, it’s our job. We take our job seriously. We will get the job done. We will do the work that is required of us. I think you know, more broadly, the question is, do we have all the tools that we need to help grow the economy in a healthy way? And that, you know, includes community development tools. Our primary regulatory tool in this space, is the Community Reinvestment Act. And I’ve been a strong believer in CRA for my whole career, and I think we need to continue to invest in CRA as a strategy for advancing economic inclusion. And, you know, we’ve had a big setback, but we have room in the next several years, I hope to revisit these questions and to continue to strengthen CRA. You know, the partnerships that we have with other agencies are really important to that. I think we’re going to need to make sure that those agencies are strong and committed to the work of inclusion. There’s been a lot of effort to support Community Development Financial Institutions around the country and CDFIs, in my view, have played really critical roles in helping local communities get access to capital, and in helping banks see the opportunity in low-income communities, or to take a risk position that a bank can take, to bring a bank in to serve local communities, and making sure we have strong support for the CDFI world. And then, you know, lastly, I’d say this is just a broad, general comment that I’d like to, you know, end with, if you think about financial services generally, including bank accounts, but more broadly, our financial services sector, it’s not really designed for low- and moderate-income people. It’s not really designed for low- and moderate-income communities, so we try and pull it there as best we can. But like, how cool would it be if we started from the idea of designing a financial services system to serve low- and moderate-income people?
Van Tol 35:04
I could not agree more, and I think the crowd also agrees. Governor, what, as you think about the current moment, what does the Federal Reserve’s data tell us about how households and small businesses are doing, both in terms of their credit access, and what that implies about the broader economy?
Barr 35:24
Well, you know, as many people have written about, there are kind of two speeds of our economy right now. For people on the upper end of the income scale, there’s a lot of capacity that’s increased spending. There’s a lot of wealth creation from the stock market that’s fed into spending. Consumer resilience: there’s been a lot of consumer resilience in the economy over the last few years. But if you look at lower- and moderate-income people, many people are having a much harder time. So you can see that in the data, you can see a little bit more credit usage and a little bit higher default or delinquency rates, not at a worrisome level, but you can see this. You can see the strain of people struggling to make ends meet. Low- and moderate-income people got hit very hard with the inflation that we had beginning in 2021-2022. People who are on fixed incomes, people who were struggling before when inflation hit, it hit them harder. It’s harder to substitute, if you’re already buying the lowest-cost good and the least of it you need, it’s very hard to change your patterns or behaviors to accommodate that inflation. On the small business front, we’ve had an extraordinary period of the last five years in new business formation in the United States, we have an incredibly dynamic entrepreneurial economy, but even on that very high base, we’ve had really strong small business formation over the last five years. And that’s been, of course, good for small businesses, but also good for productivity growth in the United States. Productivity growth has been elevated over the last five years, in part because these new businesses are more productive, and in part because they’re providing competition to incumbent businesses to improving their productivity. And we’ve also seen changes in business practices that improve productivity coming out of the COVID pandemic. So productivity is up. When you have higher productivity, you can have higher wage growth without having inflationary pressure. So we’ve seen wage growth starting to catch up for many people, not enough and later than the price increases, but that provides some hope that people will be able to, you know, have a better future for themselves with that stronger productivity. More recently, we’ve seen some diminution of credit access for small businesses reported in survey data. You can see a little bit more, I’d say, a little bit tighter terms, a little bit more reduction in small business access than had been the case one or two or three years ago. So that’s something to watch out for. But I would say the overall story for small businesses has been really extraordinarily positive over the last five years.
Van Tol 38:48
Yeah, as we shift to close here, Governor, I know, you know, there are no magic wands. There are also no crystal balls. But if you’ll indulge me for a moment. If we look ahead 10 years, what do you hope regulators will have gotten right about this moment? And let me actually sharpen the question. You have a crystal ball. You see that 10 years from now, there’s a strong likelihood of another financial crisis, but you can head it off. What would you hope in this time period, in the next 10 years, we get right that we address head on?
Barr 39:28
That’s a very big question. I’m going to take more than our allotted time to answer it. Let me start with a very short-term answer to the question. So one of the things that I think it’s really important for us to do at the Federal Reserve right now is to do what we always do. So you know, I’m the oversight governor for consumer protection right now, and for community affairs. What I’ve told our team is: Steady as she goes. The gift we give to the American people is to keep doing our work the same way we’ve always done it, not to veer this way, not to veer that way. And that stability, I think, is important in this particular moment. The second thing I’d say is we shouldn’t go backwards in this moment. So you know, when we see fair lending laws get weakened, or when we see cuts to our sister agency’s ability to enforce the law, or when we see, on the prudential side, weakening of safety and soundness standards that is inviting a problem in a few years. It’s not a problem today, in the sense that the banking system is very strong and very safe, but it’s creating risks in the future that we don’t need to take on now. Why would we…we’re in a period where bank profitability is incredibly strong. The banking sector is incredibly strong. Why would we weaken oversight at this time? Now is the time where you want to make sure you’re husbanding your resources, so that if bad times come, there’s a cushion and you don’t get a credit pullback. So both things I said are short-term. Let’s be steady as she goes. Let’s not undermine supervision and enforcement. And then let’s plan for the future. I think Representative Foster pointed out, I think, quite correctly, that artificial intelligence is going to be quite important in our economy. We need to be planning now and doing the work now, so that in five or 10 years, we don’t see financial stability risks or weaknesses in the labor market or societal dislocations, because we can see the trend line, and if we act now, we can make the world a little bit better in five or 10 years. So you know, longer term, I’ll go back to, you know what I said before, like, what if we decided that the most important thing in financial services was to make financial services designed for most human beings and most businesses and local communities, that would be a transformative moment. And we can do that work. We know what it takes. You all have been doing it in your communities. There’s lots of research and behavioral economics on the things that people need to actually do well in the financial system. There’s been lots of research on the needs of low- and moderate-income communities. So if we started the work now to say, in 10 years, we want a financial services system that is designed for low- and moderate-income households and also serves rich people really well, instead of…
Van Tol 43:01
I don’t think we have to worry about that.
Barr 43:05
…instead of a system that serves rich people really well and sometimes helps low- and moderate-income people. That would be a really fundamental shift, and I think that’s something we can do together.
Van Tol 43:16
That’s our time. I’d like us to give a warm, just economy, round of applause for Governor Michael Barr.
Barr 43:18
Thanks.
