Cleveland Fed President Beth Hammack gives opening remarks at 2026 inflation conference

All right, everybody, if you could please take your seats. We'll get started here in just a moment. I hate to interrupt the great conversations that are happening about inflation.

All right. Well, formally, welcome everybody. Thanks for joining us today. My name is Ed Netc, director of research here at the Cleveland Fed. So on behalf of my colleagues here at the Center for Inflation Research at the Cleveland Fed and our colleagues at the European Central Bank, we're delighted to be hosting this year's annual inflation drivers and dynamics conference here in Cleveland. Before we officially begin, let me run through some logistics and background materials for us all. So a key logistical item, the restrooms are through the doors, past the elevators and to the left. So now you know where those are. In terms of following along, we have paper copies of the agenda outside through the doors if you did not pick one up on your way in. The good news is that we have a robust virtual audience joining us today. So if you are joining this conference on Zoom, you are in listen and view mode only. So that means you'll be able to see and hear us, but we will not be able to see and hear you. If you have a question, that means that you'll have to put that into the Q&A at the bottom of Zoom. The agenda for Zoom is available on the resources tab in each session. We will be recording today's conference and we'll post it to our website as soon as possible. So, if there's some nugget that you miss, you can go back and watch it later. So we'll have several different presentation formats over the course of the conference. For our longer paper presentations, we've allocated 55 minutes total for them, 30 minutes for the author to present the paper, 15 minutes for our discussants, and the remainder of the time for Q&A. We'll also have a session with short presentations where we'll have four presentations over the course of an hour, 10 minutes per presenter, five minutes of discussion, and then a poster session after lunch tomorrow. For our presenters, we will have a countdown timer up here to hopefully keep things moving on time. So, to ensure that everybody, including our virtual audience, can hear you, there are microphones on your table. So, if you have a question, please use a microphone. You want to hit a button, it should light up, and then everybody can hear you just fine. And again, for our online audience, if you have questions, you can put them into the Q&A at the bottom of your screens. And our session chairs will lead the Q&As by calling on people either here or reading off items from online. And as with any hybrid conference, there's a lot of room for error. We have a great tech team who will hopefully keep the train moving smoothly. So, with that, let's turn to our very strong conference program. Opening our conference today is Beth Hammack, who serves as president and chief executive officer of the Cleveland Fed, responsible for all the bank's activities, including those related to monetary policy, bank supervision, and payment services. President Hammack has more than 30 years of experience in finance, capital markets, and risk management. She's also served on several advisory groups to the US Department of the Treasury and the financial industry. Before joining the Cleveland Fed, she was co-head of global financing at the Goldman Sachs Group Incorporated, where she was a member of its management committee. She's worked closely with US policy makers as chair of the Treasury Borrowing Advisory Committee and is a member of the Financial Research Advisory Committee and the Treasury Market Practices Group, the latter of which aims to advance financial industry best practices. President Hammack is the chair of the board of the nonprofit Math for America. She's a member of the University Hospitals board of directors, a member of the Greater Cleveland Food Bank board of directors, and a Greater Cleveland Partnership board observer. Beth, thank you for joining us today. To kick things off, I'll turn the podium over to you for your remarks.