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The Federal Reserves influence on the economy is immense, and often misunderstood. President of the San Francisco Fed Mary Daly gives an exclusive, firsthand look into the central banks daily decision-making, explaining how the Feds policies, at both the regional and national level, ripple through society. From housing prices to immigrations impact on labor, Daly weighs the major factors shaping the U.S. economy. As political and market pressures mount, she reflects on what it means to lead with discipline and data, and what every business leader can learn from the Feds balancing act. This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by the former editor-in-chief of Fast Company Bob Safian. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with todays top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode. You run one of the Fed’s 12 regional banks. Your district covers nine Western states, plus Guam, American Samoa, The Mariana Islands. Can you briefly describe the role of your office, and how it relates to the Fed overall? When we hear Fed Chair Jerome Powell announcing a change in interest rates, are you feeding into that? How does all this work? In 1913, when the Fed was formed, there was a decision that we shouldn’t be Washington-centered. That having a presence in Washington with the Board of Governors was important, but having 12 regional reserve banks was equally important so that we could balance out the decisions about the economy across the country, not just in DC. So I lead one of the 12 reserve banks, and those reserve banks do feed into monetary policy. We go to each and every FOMC meeting. We are rotating on votes, but we’re always participating. We’re thinking about how our districts with the lived experience in the economy is and how that matters when we make monetary policy. Monetary policy, the misnomer is it’s all about numbers and markets, but it’s actually about people and lived economy experiences throughout the nation. And so that’s the role of reserve banks, in addition to managing all the operational duties that our teams have, including making sure you have cash when you need it, that your bank can get it and distribute it, making sure the banking system is safe and sound. You’ve said there’s no politics in the Fed. You’re not funded by the federal government, so a shutdown doesn’t affect you, but everybody tries to influence you guys, policymakers, the White House, investors. How do you keep that politics and that pressure out of what you do? The founding of the Federal Reserve 1913 had two elements to it that I think have been durable over time and led the way for central banking across the globe. First was that you had to have a regional voice and the second was that you had to be independent. Because monetary policy is made for the longer run and the decisions we make on where to put cash depots and how to distribute our supervision, that’s all got to be done no matter what administration is in place. So to be durable, especially on the monetary policy part, Congress said let’s make these individuals independent of political persuasion and really thinking about the goals we gave them, and in our case, it’s price stability and full employment, making sure inflation is at 2%, making sure that the economy is not producing lots of unemployment or running so hot, so un-sustainably that inflation should go up. So those are the goals we have. You asked how do you maintain that? How do you not get influenced? Ultimately, who we work for is the American people. Of course, individuals have points of view and we have to consider those because otherwise we’d just be in an echo chamber. But there’s a difference in listening to understand and listening to be persuaded. And when the President tries to remove a Fed Governor, as President Trump has done with Lisa Cook, how distracting is that from It’s really not distracting from the task at hand. Let me just speak about myself. We’re fiduciary stewards of public trust and public responsibilities, and so that’s where I have to attend. Now, I think about not just what’s right in front of me, but ensuring that the American people have a stable and healthy economy over the long term and that the independence of the Fed is preserved not just for the next two months or two weeks, but in fact over the time period, passing that baton to the next generation of leaders. There’s been so much disruption this year in 2025. Are there particular economic indicators that you are most focused on right now? So I think about it as a three-legged stool. So the first component is the public data, the things we get from the government, the things that we get on a regular basis. They’re very, very important, but they’re only one part of our overall data collection. We also get data from the private sector. One of the more critical components of that three-legged stool, which is underappreciated in my opinion, is the time that the reserve bank Presidents in particular spend talking to people, to CEOs, small, medium and large businesses, to community members, civic leaders, unions and workers thinking about not just what were they doing last week, but what are they doing going forward. So right now, I’m very focused on that third leg. And the reason is because when you get to a point where the economy is changing, you have to rely on people who are telling you not what they were doing last week, but what they are doing next week, the next month, the next quarter and ultimately, the next year. And we take that valuable information back to the FOMC meeting. It’s really a robust process and one that I think is critical at these moments. Obviously, the economy is always changing to some extent, but it certainly feels like we’re at a certain kind of inflection point. I know you’ve rated the sentiment of your region as cautiously optimistic, which is a little incongruous with an economy that seems like it’s moving to something we’re not quite sure where it’s going to go. Can you address that disconnect and maybe explain how and where you see the economy moving? Absolutely. So there is quite a bit of uncertainty still, not as high as earlier in the year. The uncertainty really spiked after April 2nd, after Liberation Day. There was just so much uncertainty people didn’t know if they were going to be able to buy their smartphone or if they should buy it right away or if they should wait. Consumers were uncertain. Businesses were uncertain about what’s this going to mean. But at this point, I think those things have settled, and the economy weathered that fairly well. The unemployment rate has gone up a little bit, but not that much. Inflation has gradually come down except in the tariffed sectors. So the only places where you see prices rising are in the ones direcly affected by tariffs. And so people think of that increasingly as a one time price level adjustment and then they’ll be okay. Another thing that I think is important is pick a basket of goods that you like to purchase. Put them in a cart at one of your favorite online retailers and then check what has happened to that basket of goods over time. And what you’re seeing is that while certain items have gone up, other ones are being deeply discounted, so people feel like they’re not losing the kind of ground they lost in the big inflation rise after the pandemic. So I think that gives people some confidence. Recession indicators were quite high and rising earlier in the year and now they’re not really predicting it at all. Consumer sentiment has gone back up after falling, business sentiment has gone back up after falling. So I think that’s where I get the cautious optimism. I was at University of Utah a couple weeks ago and the students are optimistic, and I was really encouraged by that because that generation is like a bellwether. They see that if they learn these new skills, AI, et cetera, they can really make a dent in the economy. So what is the new economy going to look like? The truth is no one knows, but we do know what the elements will be. Certainly, artificial intelligence is making its way. Is it going to be transformative? Is this going to be the new steam engine or electricity? I don’t know. But it is making a contribution to people’s ability to do things faster, better, cheaper and hopefully, will also make a contribution to us doing things that we never imagined were possible.
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E-Commerce
With no end in sight for the political standoff that shuttered the federal government, funding for some key programs is drying up. More than 40 million Americans may not see their food stamps issued next month, as the government shutdown extends into its third full week. Some states have begun warning their residents of the looming threat to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, better known as SNAP. Because Republicans in Washington D.C., failed to pass a federal budget, causing the federal government shutdown, November 2025 SNAP benefits cannot be paid, a notification on Pennsylvanias SNAP info page reads. New York Governor Kathy Hochul demanded that the federal government release funds for SNAP recipients, accusing the Trump administration of deliberately enacting a cruel, senseless and politically motivated punishment that could be avoided. Im outraged that Washington Republicans are deliberately withholding federal funding from millions of New Yorkers who rely on SNAP to put food on the table, Hochul said in a press release, highlighting the three million New Yorkers who stand to be affected by a SNAP shortfall. Ronald Ward, the acting associate administrator of SNAP, warned states in a letter that the program was only funded through October, Axios reported earlier this month. That budget shortfall could leave 42 million people without the benefits they rely on, beginning in November. The letter cautioned states to hold off on distributing funds to SNAP recipients EBT cards until further notice. Blame game The federal shutdown has turned into a heated blame game, even compared to past shutdown standoffs. At the end of September, Democrats refused to support a bill to fund the federal government, seizing on the rare opportunity for political leverage to demand an extension to the tax credits that reduce the cost of health insurance for millions of Americans. Democrats have also called for Republicans to roll back Medicaid cuts from the Big Beautiful Bill that passed in July. Because Republicans cant hit the 60 vote threshold needed to fund the government without Democrats, the shutdown is a stalemate unless one side backs down. The Trump administration has taken extraordinary measures to associate the shutdown with his political opposition, even ordering airports to play a video of Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem blaming Democrats for shutdown-related travel delays. Many airports refused to air the video, citing policies against displaying political content. Noem isnt the only member of Trumps cabinet to spread that messaging. Democrats are putting free healthcare for illegal aliens and their political agenda ahead of food security for American families, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said on X, blaming what she referred to as the Democrat shutdown. During the shutdown, some government websites are displaying unusually partisan messages. The USDAs website is currently topped by a banner noting that it wont be updated and blaming the Radical Left Democrat shutdown. President Trump has made it clear he wants to keep the government open and support those who feed, fuel, and clothe the American people, the message reads. Selective funding Most of the federal government is shuttered in light of the political standoff, but the Trump administration is finding ways to fund its own political priorities. Trump ordered the Pentagon and the White House to use all available funds to pay active-duty members of the military, avoiding the political fallout of servicemembers missing paychecks. The White House also opted to fund the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children, better known as WIC, using money collected from tariffs. “The Trump White House will not allow impoverished mothers and their babies to go hungry because of the Democrats’ political games, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told Axios. The Democrats are so cruel in their continual votes to shut down the government that they forced the WIC program for the most vulnerable women and children to run out this week.Thankfully, President Trump and the White House have identified a creative solution to transfer https://t.co/tj9Xt7f4yQ— Karoline Leavitt (@PressSec) October 7, 2025 Trump went around Congress to allocate those funds, but Congress also has the ability to selectively dole out cash for programs that would otherwise have their funding cut off during a federal shutdown. Still, the food stamps program may not be a priority for Republicans given the partys willingness to slash SNAP dramatically to fund tax cuts and defense spending in the massive bill that passed this summer. The federal shutdowns short-term hit to SNAP could be devastating for Americans who rely on the program to put food on the table, but lasting changes to the program mean fewer Americans will be eligible for food assistance when the spigot of federal funds does eventually open back up.
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E-Commerce
Hannah Elsakr says that Adobe’s top clientsthe owners of some of the most protected, most valuable brands and IP in the worldhad a stark message for the company regarding Firefly, its generative AI engine: They wanted more, and they wanted better. “They told us they actually needed models that understood all their products, all their brands, their creative direction,” says Elsakr, Adobe’s VP of GenAI New Business Ventures. “They have characters, they have particular motion styles, and they needed us to train on that.” Fireflywhich uses prompts to create assets across all Adobes vector, bitmap, and motion appscouldn’t do this because it doesnt understand brands at the IP level. “We consider that a feature, not a bug,” Alsark tells me. Firefly is a generic engine, but Adobes top clients need to create millions of assets for dozens of different platforms and marketing media, all of them conforming to their own strict IP rules and brand books. This is why the company has built a new consultancy arm for Fortune 2000 companies to develop bespoke AI models that could craft hundreds of thousands of images, illustrations, and videos that conform strictly to their IP and creative guidelines. Its name: Adobe AI Foundry. [Image: Adobe] The million-asset problem The move comes as a direct response to a mathematical nightmare facing every major brand. Alsark calls it the “combinatorics math problem”. A company with just eight products that wants to market them across 15 channels in 35 languages with a few refreshes a year is already looking at creating half a million individual assets. “With social, we know we’re doing probably three refreshes a week,” she explains. “So the real numbers are in the millions and millions and millions.” Before now, that scale was simply impossible. Time, budgets, and human resources are all finite. “The only unlock here is responsible AI,” Alsark insists. This crushing demand from the attention economy is precisely why Adobes biggest clients, companies like The Home Depot and Walt Disney Imagineering, came to them. They needed an industrial-scale solution, but one that respected their most valuable assettheir intellectual property. Adobes public Firefly model was a start, but it was designed to be IP-agnostic. While brands applauded this safety-first approach, they needed an AI that could learn their worldtheir characters, their color palettes, their unique aesthetic. Last year’s self-serve “Custom Models” were a step in that direction, allowing companies to train the AI on a single concept, like a specific style or shape. But clients wanted more. They wanted the whole kingdom, not just one castle. [Image: Adobe] A bespoke AI partnership Adobe AI Foundry isn’t a piece of software you buy off the shelf; it’s a deep, consultative partnership that feels more like hiring a boutique division of AI experts from Accenture or IBM than licensing a tool. Adobe targets the Fortune 2000, a customer base where it already has deep roots through its Creative Cloud and marketing software suites. “You actually get a team of allocated experts from Adobe,” Alsark says, listing “applied scientists, engineers, [and] creative workflow experts.” These teams work directly with a client to build a unique generative AI model from the ground up, trained exclusively on that company’s private data and assets. The process is intensive and can take a couple of months just to get the first results. It begins with use-case discovery, where Adobes team identifies the core business problem, whether its creating seasonal ad campaigns for a retailer like Amazon Fresh or generating limitless variations of a hero image for a beauty brand like MAC. Then comes the heavy lifting. Adobes engineers surgically reopen their foundational Firefly models to retrain them on the clients proprietary IP, a process involving billions of parameters. After months of training and untold GPU cycles and consumed watts, the final model inherits all the world knowledge of the base Firefly engine but is then overfitted to speak the client’s brand language fluently and exclusively. The output is locked down; it belongs to the client and will never be mixed with another company’s data. The trust factor The entire proposition hinges on two things Adobe believes it alone can offer at this scale: commercial safety and seamless integration. The company has been careful to build its foundational models on licensed Adobe Stock data, shielding its clients from the copyright nightmares that have plagued other AI models. Foundry extends that protection by creating a secure vault for a brands own IP. This focus on safety and its existing enterprise presence is Adobes strategic moat against competitors like Canva, which is also aggressively pursuing the corporate market. When I bring up the competition, Alsark doesn’t seem to be concerned. She claims that clients came to Adobe after experimenting with everything from startups to hyperscalers because they trust Adobe to understand the entire creativity landscape. “They are already deeply into our creative tools. We’re in their marketing stack, and we are enterprise-grade,” she says. The ability to plug a custom, brand-aware AI model directly into the Photoshop, Illustrator, and After Effects workflows that a company&8217;s creative teams already live in is a killer advantage. Molly Battin, the CMO at The Home Depot, an early Foundry customer, calls it “an exciting step forward in embracing cutting-edge technologies to deepen customer engagement.” For an old guy like me, tired of seeing Silicon Valley promising revolutions every other week, this feels different. The initial AI craze, as I called it in my chat with Alsark, is still about public-facing tools that felt like creative toys. For most of us, anyway. Adobe AI Foundry represents the next, far more serious phase: AI is being forged into a bespoke, industrial-grade weapon for the worlds biggest brands. Its no longer about a single person creating a wild image or helping with a creative roadblock; its about a corporation generating a million on-brand assets before lunch. Its less of a craze and more of a quiet, brutally efficient corporate takeover of the creative process.
Category:
E-Commerce
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