Lisa Cook, who sits on the Federal Reserve Board, told the Exchequer Club in Washington on Wednesday 15 July that "so far, the most dire predictions about an AI job transition have not come to fruition".1 The Exchequer Club is a long-standing forum where financial policymakers deliver set-piece remarks to an audience of Washington economists, lobbyists and reporters, which makes its texts drafted rather than spontaneous.
Compare that text with her last one. On 27 May, addressing Stanford's Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR), Cook reported that speculative-grade software bond spreads had widened on AI-disruption concern: lenders were charging lower-rated software firms more to borrow, because they doubted those firms would survive what was coming. She called the moment "the most significant reorganisation of work in generations". The 15 July address carries no bond spreads, no solvency framing and no financial-stability language on AI at all.
What that absence means cannot be read off the document, and this briefing will not pretend otherwise. A speech carries no obligation to repeat its predecessor. A governor mindful that credit-market commentary from the Board moves the very spreads it describes has a professional reason to say such a thing once and not twice, and institutional caution about The Fed's remit reads at least as plausibly as a changed mind. Cook did not say she had revised anything, and nobody in the room asked her.
Cook did keep the capital side of the story, and kept it in figures. She flagged $1.5 trillion in announced data-centre plans, only a fraction of it built, already lifting prices for chips, equipment, software and utilities. That is the same technology, described through its balance sheet rather than through its payroll, and on that side The Fed is content to name a number.
