In advance of this week’s Fed meeting, Kocherlakota calls on the Fed to prohibit banks from paying dividends to shareholders. “Banks should be keeping as much capital as they can,” he says.

Without a coordinated system of testing, tracing, and quarantining for COVID-19, economic activity cannot resume—and the downturn will be steeper and longer than any since before World War II, says Rochester economist Narayana Kocherlakota.

“Proximity is usually associated with intimacy, and distance with strangeness,” explains Rochester anthropologist Robert Foster. “The public challenge at the moment is that we must learn to express our care and concern by maintaining distance, which is counter-intuitive.”

The $2 trillion stimulus plan working its way through Congress likely won’t be adequate to save the US economy from recession in the face of the coronavirus pandemic, says University of Rochester economist Narayana Kocherlakota.

At the committee’s first meeting of 2020, Rochester professor Narayana Kocherlakota expects the Federal Open Market Committee to hold the course on interest rates, as issues from trade wars to impeachment loom.

With an outbreak of coronavirus making for an unusual travel season, Rochester faculty describe the traditions—and logistical challenges—as more than 1.3 billion Chinese go on vacation at the same time to mark the new year.

Rochester professor of economics Narayana Kocherlakota expects to be disappointed this week, as the Federal Reserve Open Market Committee has signaled that it will make no changes to an eight-year-old policy statement for meeting inflation and unemployment goals.

The Great Recession officially lasted through June 2009, with unemployment levels peaking in October of that year. And while unemployment is now the lowest it’s been in the last 50 years, Rochester experts say the recession is still very much with us.

“There’s a lot of evidence that in the last eight years or so the Fed has lost control,” says Narayana Kocherlakota, the Lionel W. McKenzie Professor of Economics at the University of Rochester.

President Donald Trump is calling on the Federal Reserve to zero out interest rates—or adopt a negative rate—at its meeting this week. But Narayana Kocherlakota says that won’t happen.