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Here's the Scoop
An exclusive sit-down with Chicago Fed President Austan Goolsbee; Fort Bliss detention center hits a roadblock
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- [00:00]
Austan Goolsbee
With leading networking and connectivity, advanced cybersecurity and expert partnership, Comcast business helps turn today's enterprises into engines of modern business. Powering the engine of modern business. Powering possibilities. Restrictions apply.
- [00:18]
Brian Chung
Hey, everyone. Welcome to here's the scoop from NBC News. I'm Brian Chung. Lots going on in the podcast today. We've got the latest on a massive new immigration detention facility in Texas A. We also have a vibe check from Alaska ahead of tomorrow's big Trump Putin meeting. And just like that, Carrie Bradshaw writes her last chapter. All that's coming up. But first, donuts. Stay with me. I made a visit yesterday to Mellow Cream Donuts in Springfield, Illinois. Yeah, we're going to. Yeah, we're going to do a donut. Donut taste. Yeah. And why did I travel halfway across the country for a sweet treat? Because it offers a taste of the US Economy. Mellow Cream struggling to hire enough workers and dealing with inflation, which is up, according to a new report this morning. And now the co owner, Chris Larson says they're going to be dealing with tariffs on the palm oil they use to fry their donuts, which comes from Indonesia.
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Austan Goolsbee
It used to be closer to like 2000 to $2100 weekly. Now it's going to move up to $4200.
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Brian Chung
For the exact same product?
- [01:15]
Austan Goolsbee
For the exact same product.
- [01:17]
Brian Chung
It wasn't just me chomping on some donuts. I was there with the president of the Chicago Fed, Austan Goolsbee. He, he's one of 12 people at the Federal Reserve who votes on interest rates based on the data and visits like this one. So after a little tour of the factory, he and I sat down for a conversation. We're at a donut factory. Why?
- [01:38]
Austan Goolsbee
Who doesn't like donuts? But look, the Federal Reserve banks like Chicago Fed get out and meet with business people in the District. In our case, it's heart of the Midwest. And this is a local manufacturing business in the food economy. And a lot of times you can get insights about the economy before they start showing up in the data because the data only come out with a lag.
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Brian Chung
So when you think about your role as a Fed president and also someone that boats on interest rates this year, does anything that you saw here at Melloquin kind of make you think about.
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Austan Goolsbee
The next move bid? The Fed by law, is supposed to maximize employment and stabilize prices. So it's inflation and employment that are really the twin towers of how we think about setting of rates. And there are parts of the job market where there's still basically labor shortage. It's very hard for people to find workers. And that's what you kind of saw here at the donut factory. On the other side, if the cost structure is going to be that their costs are increasing and they end up having to pass that on to consumers, we got to weigh off the inflation part with the employment part. Yeah.
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Brian Chung
And so Chris was mentioning during the tour with you that yes, there maybe is the beginnings of this impact of the tariffs having a little bit of difficulty finding workers. But at the same time, any sort of upgrades that he would want to make with machinery would be very costly. In which case lower interest rate from here might, might help indeed.
- [03:13]
Austan Goolsbee
And look, those are the trade offs you're hearing from the businesses. The margins they have to balance against the capital cost margins, the labor cost margins and the how much will consumers pay for the product. That's not unlike the same dynamic that plays out at a high level around the table at the Fed where you're trying to balance out inflation impacts, employment impacts, investment impacts.
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Brian Chung
And when you go to that table, certainly you bring memories of visits like this one here at Mellow Cream there, but you bring in a lot of other stuff too.
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Austan Goolsbee
Yeah, indeed. I may physically bring some of the Mellow Cream donuts to the meeting.
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Brian Chung
Jay Powell would love that.
- [03:52]
Austan Goolsbee
Powell is a donut guy. But each of the reserve banks, of which there are 12 around the country, manifest one of the genius moves of the creation of the Federal Reserve System in the Federal Reserve act was let's not have the entire financial system of the United States controlled by Washington D.C. and Wall Street. Let's have monetary independence built in by representing regions all around the country. We come to the meetings with the perspective Mine is heart of the Midwest, 7th District. A lot of manufacturing, a lot of agriculture and food economy. And some of those are the most cyclical parts of the economy. So they are a little bit the canary in the coal mine. Talking about where we are in the.
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Brian Chung
Business cycle, overall economy. If we zoom out from Mellow Cream Donuts, we just got a jobs report that showed fewer job gains than we initially thought for several months this year. In addition to an inflation report this week that showed prices rising by 2.7% over the last year in tandem. What does that tell you about the next move the Fed needs to make?
- [05:01]
Austan Goolsbee
I usually don't like tying our hands if we've got a bunch of important data still to come before the next meeting. If there's weakness in the job market that says we got to be on Guard on that side of what the Fed does. In the inflation report. It was relatively mellow overall inflation, but there were some concerns like services prices, which are probably not being driven by tariffs rising faster than we would want. So where's a little bit of element of let's get a few months of data before we make any conclusions. The hardest thing that the Fed ever has to do is get the timing right at moments of transition. And the only way to do that is through, try to figure out the through line, not lurch, ah, this, this week the data came out. Let's change what we're doing. You gotta kind of look through that.
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Brian Chung
I mean, markets are pricing in a September rate cut. People who are running businesses are saying, hey, a rate cut would help. What's your response to that?
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Austan Goolsbee
Look, it's not mine to respond. I, I think as we go through this fall, September, November, December, all of those are live moments that we could be cutting rates before. There was April 2nd for most better part of a year. I've been saying, I thought we were on a pretty solid economy with inflation coming back down to target and the unemployment rate showing pretty stable full employment. So rates probably could go down a fair amount. When that happens or how that happens is going to have to be determined by the data and by how this goes.
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Brian Chung
How is the data, the quality of the data? There's been some questions from the White House over the quality of the data coming out from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
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Austan Goolsbee
Look, all I'll say is there no such thing as perfect data in an environment where there's uncertainty or you have questions about the data. You want as much data as you can get. You want data that you gather at Mellow Cream Donuts. You want data from private sector sources. You want, you want data from the best of all the sources in the world, which is the US Government's official statistics. The Bureau of Labor Statistics, I would say, is the gold standard. But you know, in Fed world the gold standard is not one that's not a good one. But that's the highest quality data we have and we use that, the BLS data at the Fed. We study that quite intensively and as does the private sector because that's the best day to go on.
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Brian Chung
Something we have to acknowledge is that the President has been pretty hard on the Federal Reserve and Jay Powell and the board and the FOMC for cutting interest rates into the end of last year and then not cutting interest rates as soon as he entered office. He has argued the Fed is partisan. What's your response to that?
- [07:58]
Austan Goolsbee
Well, look, when you join the Fed, you're kind of out of the partisan election business. So I'm not going to engage in the scrum. I started in the Fed in 2023. As soon as I came in, we raised rates pretty significantly and held them at a very high level for a long time. We then, as inflation was coming down, lowered rates a bit based on the economic conditions. And that is the thing that should drive Fed decision makings. In a way, it's what we call Fed independence, that central banks and all the richest countries of the world are as insulated from political interference as they can be because it's really important. If you don't have central bank independence, inflation is coming back.
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Brian Chung
Chicago Fed President Austan Goolsbee, thanks so much.
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Austan Goolsbee
Thank you.
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Brian Chung
And by the way, if you want to see those donuts and more of that conversation, check out Top Story with Tom Yamas tonight on NBC News. Now, smells are not included, though. All right, we're going to take a quick break. And when we're back, we're going to Texas brb.
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Julia Ainslie
This Supreme Court term isn't business as usual. It's a full blown battle over democracy. Justices are shattering precedent, grabbing power and even turning on their own. It's messy, it's high stakes and it's already reshaping how this country works. And our podcast, Strict Scrutiny breaks it all down legally, clearly, and with just the right amount of side eye. New episodes drop every Monday. Subscribe and listen wherever you get your podcasts and on YouTube.
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Austan Goolsbee
Hey guys, Willie Geist here reminding you to check out the Sunday Sit down podcast. On this week's episode, I get together with a guy who's been in the headlines a bit recently, Stephen Colbert. After the surprise cancellation of his late show by cbs. Stephen, Stephen and I talk about his rise up through improv comedy to that spot in late night. You can get our conversation now for free wherever you download your podcasts.
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Brian Chung
Welcome back to here's the Scoop. In Texas, a massive new detention center is set to open this week at Fort Bliss in El Paso. It's slated to become the nation's largest with the eventual capacity to hold up to 5,5000 people. That's in addition to the 60,000 people ICE says it's already holding in detention. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is adding to the mix, announcing a second state run detention center called Deportation Depot after opening the first one, dubbed Alligator Alcatraz. It's all part of the Trump administration's push to ramp up deportations on multiple fronts. So to dive in a little deeper, let's chat with NBC News senior Homeland Security correspondent Julia Ainslie. Hey, Julia.
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Julia Ainslie
Hey, thanks so much for having me.
- [10:53]
Brian Chung
So let's start off with what's happening in Texas at Fort Bliss. These are tent style facilities. What exactly are they opening here?
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Julia Ainslie
It's basically a tent city. We've seen this before, but not used by ICE in this way. It used to be that Customs and Border Protection would put up tents when there was a surge at the border so that immigrants who were coming across could be processed before they were released or sent over to ICE detention. Now, though, they want to use these to hold immigrants before they're deported. And that can be a much longer timeline. Sometimes it can be up to six months or even in cases I've seen, it has gone up to a year. And so what that means is that there's a lot of concern about whether or not ICE and these contractors who are getting the money to build these facilities are going to be able to keep these people in humane conditions for a long period of time. And so far, they've run into a lot of problems trying to build it.
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Brian Chung
It's important to know that the Biden administration used these in 2021, and at that time there were some pretty serious concerns about the what exactly does detention at a tent facility like Fort Bliss look like?
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Julia Ainslie
That was a unique situation because they were dealing with children in that case. And so there was a lot of concern that the contractors they brought in didn't know how to deal with children. It wasn't humane. They weren't adequately training the staff on how to deal with children who were facing some really difficult mental health issues after they crossed the border without a family member. This is different in the fact that they now may have security concerns. This is to hold single adults. But if they are worried that any of these people might be dangerous or might try to leave, it's much easier to leave a tent than it is a brick and mortar building. So they need more security, more staffing. They will run into some similar issues in that they're going to have to keep it waterproofed, they're going to have to keep it air conditioned. We can think of two incidents where they weren't accomplishing that. When they erected these tents in Guantanamo Bay, they were not able to keep it air conditioned. And most recently in Alligator Alcatraz, which is being built by the state of Florida, they had flooding within the first week of operations because again, they're dealing with tents now. These are hard canvas. Tents have been inside some of them before they go to the ground. Don't think of it as, you know, a zipper or something you can't stand up in. These are huge rooms you can walk through, but at the end of the day, it isn't run like a brick and mortar building. And they're supposed to be used in an emergency situation. Oftentimes these are the same companies that build tents after a hurricane. They're supposed to be temporary. So it's hard to imagine how the government is going to hold 5,000 people there. That's their goal for long periods of time before deportation.
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Brian Chung
I want to ask about the bigger picture efforts to get more immigrants into these types of detention facilities, because we're now hearing ICE expansion in Washington, D.C. what do we know about that?
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Julia Ainslie
There are two big ways that ICE is expanding in D.C. right now. So one way is that they're increasing arrest of immigrants. Now, that is within ICE's mission, but now they have much more cooperation from D.C. just today, the D.C. police chief put out a new order saying that D.C. police who encounter immigrants even at a traffic stop need to share that information with ICE. This is crazy if you think about the 180 this city has done on what were some policies that really were sanctuary policies for immigrants that protected them, that allowed them to talk to law enforcement without that information being shared with ice. To put this in context, I mean, undocumented immigrants are allowed to vote in the city of D.C. but they could now be stopped and have their information turned over to ICE on their way to vote. It's a really confusing message. And then on the other side, ICE is sending over some of its agents to now patrol with the U.S. marshals and the Metropolitan Police Department in D.C. it used to be nighttime patrols. Now they're 24 7, going through very urban areas of D.C. where there's a lot of nightlife, where there's a lot of people often scaring some people by the use of force, by how they're dressed. And they are now able to assist the police to arrest people who are accused of crime. So those could be American citizens, which is not something ISIS typically does. So they're expanding their reach in D.C. in a big way.
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Brian Chung
Just this week, another big piece of the president's immigration policy are these deportation flights. And you're following, Julia, how it's getting harder now to track how the administration is actually carrying out these flights.
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Julia Ainslie
It's getting harder to figure out where people are going. In a lot of cases, there's actually a man who retired from being a financial executive to track every ICE flight across the country. That's Tom Cartwright. His data has been used by NBC, by cnn, by New York, others, because it's really the only place where we've been able to track the tail numbers of airplanes that are chartered by ICE to deport immigrants or to move them around the country. And what he has found is that since the inauguration, through the end of July, there have been over 1,000 flights that deported people that left the country. But then he says there are more than 40,000. So why is there such a big difference between 1,000 and 40,000? Well, those 39,000 were internalized flights. They're moving people around the country. ICE has done this in the past. A lot of times it would be to alleviate overcrowding in one area of the country. But now these are people who are being arrested in the interior of the country, and then they could be flown to somewhere completely far away. And what we're finding is that a lot of lawyers and family members are having a hard time keeping track of where their loved ones are going. And that's part of the problem with these flights. And a lot of these people aren't necessarily deportable, yet. They could still have pending asylum claims. Meanwhile, ICE is detaining them, moving them around the country. It's getting harder and harder for them to show up to their court cases, to keep in touch with their lawyers and continue to pursue what could be a legal path to stay in the United States.
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Brian Chung
A lot of threads to follow there. Julie Ainsley, thanks so much.
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Julia Ainslie
Thanks for having me.
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Brian Chung
All right, let's get to some headlines. We are just a day out from that face to face meeting between President Trump and Vladimir Putin in Alaska over the war in Ukraine. And we're already getting a vibe check on how both sides are approaching it. So Trump, he's warning Putin of very severe consequences if he doesn't end the war in Ukraine. While Putin sounds almost optimistic about the whole thing, talking to his top ministers and security chiefs early this morning, he called Trump's push for peace energetic and sincere. So here's the game plan for tomorrow, at least as planned, the two will meet one on one with translators at 11:30am local time. That's 3:30 Eastern. Then a joint press conference. And by the way, all of this is historical. It is Vladimir Putin's first time on US Soil in a decade and his first face to face with Trump since 2019. Our Chief White House correspondent, Peter Alexander is already in Anchorage Hello, Brian.
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Austan Goolsbee
We're here in America's last frontier. This meeting is set to take place at Joint Base Elmendorf Richardson that is here in Anchorage. Base, notably that played a key role monitoring and deterring the Soviet Union during the height of the Cold War. The anticipation in this city is building. Reporters from around the globe arriving with some members of Alaska's Ukrainian population holding vigils and protests. And even as the world awaits this summit, there really is this growing sense that this is only a first step. With President Trump already floating his desire for a follow up meeting with Ukraine's president Volodymyr Zelensky in the room.
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Brian Chung
And watch out for Erin. That's the tropical storm that's expected to become this season's first hurricane. That'll happen by tomorrow night with the possibility of upgrading to a major hurricane by Sunday. But here's the thing. It looks likely to hook away from the east coast, meaning no direct impact. But still, US Beaches along the coast could see some gnarly surf and rip currents this weekend. So it might look like perfect beach weather. But remember to stay away. If a rip current grabs you, don't fight it. Swim parallel until you're free, then head in. And if you can't break loose, float, tread and wave for help, save the Baywatch moment for someone else. And in the sports world, the Boston seas are going for a lot of B's. Last night the NBA Board of Governors unanimously approved the sale of the 18 time NBA champion Boston Celtics for a whopping $6.1 billion. This is the largest sum paid for an American professional sports team in history. The team was signed over to an investor group run by private equity mogul Bill Chisholm, who will have full control of the team by 2028. And speaking of basketball, guess what's back. Yeah, give me some of that round ball rock. The NBA on NBC is back. For the first time since the 90s, the Peacock has been home to some historic NBA moments, most notably the Michael Jordan era Dream Team Bulls. The full NBA schedule will be released today. And I think it's only right if MJ comes on. Here's the scoop to debrief after the first game on October 21st. Open invite. And one more thing before we go. So get your Cosmos and your Manolo Blahniks ready because tonight is the night we say goodbye to Carrie Bradshaw. Allegedly. That's right. This series finale of and Just like that is on tonight, almost 30 years after the original Sex and the City went on the air. Now I have to Confess, I'm not exactly the target demo for the show. Although my friends tell me I'm a Charlotte, which I think is good. But anyway, I know there are millions of fans out there getting ready for tonight, so. So I'm gonna pass the mic over to my co host and super fan of the show, Yasmin Vasugian for this one.
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Julia Ainslie
Yeah, Brian, I am a super fan. I've been a fan from day one. I was drinking Cosmos with the girls in downtown Manhattan. I actually copied Carrie Bradshaw's outfit because I do think I am a Carrie, by the way, just FYI. But the question is, how is this franchise gonna end? How is Sex and the City and just like that actually gonna end? Is it gonna end with the girls together drinking wine? Or maybe even some Cosmos in Carrie's old apartment? That's what I think is gonna happen. But I wanted to come outside of 30 Rock to find out what Americans think is gonna happen to the end of this franchise. Let's go. I hope the girlies get back together.
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Brian Chung
Less drama, friendship, empowering women.
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Julia Ainslie
I don't think she needs a man in her life anymore.
- [21:11]
Brian Chung
You know, she had a love life.
- [21:14]
Julia Ainslie
And now she's good on her own. New Yorkers, we hoped for that relationship, but the reality is that the show, the underlining message is that you're always gonna have the cd, you're gonna have your girls. And she learns that being single is.
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Brian Chung
Truly what it's about.
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Julia Ainslie
And she doesn't need a man in her life. So, Brian, the consensus here in midtown Manhattan is the girls end up together. They are each other's soulmates. So basically I.
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Brian Chung
But we'll have to see. Yaz, thanks so much for that. Well, from all of us here at here's the scoop, I'm Brian Chung. See you tomorrow. Taking over the helm of NBC Nightly News, a 75 year old broadcast, it's a great responsibility. Good evening, I'm Tom Yamas. You have to go out there to.
- [22:13]
Austan Goolsbee
Bring people at home closer to the store.
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Brian Chung
Wildfires continue to be a threat. With that massive hurricane comes the massive response. The best reporters in our business know how to listen. And when you listen, you get the truth. For NBC News, NBC News, I'm Tom Yamas. That's what we do every night.
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Austan Goolsbee
NBC Nightly News with Tom Yamas. Evenings on NBC.