Your Fed, Your Voice: Charles Gascon

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My name is Charles Gascon. I’m an economist and research officer in the Research Division at the St. Louis Fed.

My role is multifaceted, I guess you could say. So internally, my responsibilities involve monitoring economic conditions in our District for the bank president and collecting information from business leaders and other people in the community as to what’s going on today. A lot of it has to do with trying to take that individual business leader perspective and then bring it all together to form a more cohesive picture about what's going on in the economy.

And that’s what I've always found to be really enjoyable about the work is this idea that you're trying to provide honest and objective analysis, aligning the data with a story. And it’s not my story. It's a story about what we're hearing, boots on the ground.

And then externally, I'm out in the public a lot, giving presentations to chamber of commerce groups or other nonprofit organizations, providing them with an update on the state of the national and regional economy, and sharing what Fed policymakers are talking about and answering questions that they may have about everything from local labor markets to cryptocurrency to the debt ceiling. I mean, you name it. And I get questions about pretty much any economics topic that you can think about.

Being out there, talking about economics with either my colleagues here at the Bank or just the everyday people on the street, it just doesn't feel like work for me. It’s always been an area I’m curious about.

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