For Thomas Hoenig, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, chocolate isn't as sweet as it used to be: The cost of almost every ingredient has gone up. ``Commodities across the board have pressured us,'' said Bryan Merryman, the chief financial officer of Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory Inc., as he led Hoenig on a two-hour tour of the company's Durango, Colorado, factory this week. ``There are a lot of pressures in our system that we haven't seen before.''...``When you see a business like this one, where everything it uses has been accelerating in price, you see what it does to a business person,'' Hoenig, 61, said. The July 15 visit ``reinforced the way I think, because I'm on record as being concerned about inflation,'' he said.
...
Anecdotes like the ones gathered at the Rocky Mountain factory make their way into the Fed's so-called Beige Book report and are a part of a give-and-take process of gathering and sharing information, Hoenig said. ``The Fed is not just a Washington-centric institution,'' he said. ``It's an institution that has 12 regional banks reaching out for information and sharing information with citizens.''...``What the reserve banks hear from their contacts can provide the Fed with an early warning of changes that may not show up in the published statistics for several weeks or even months,'' said Al Broaddus, former president of the Richmond Fed.
As reported by Bloomberg News.