The bottom line of the speech is that the Fed will move cautiously and the economy might not be cooling as much as previously thought.
The buzz around the expansive, two-story lobby of the Jackson Lake Lodge before Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell spoke on Friday morning was that any attempt to clarify the economic outlook in an environment as hazy as the current one would be nearly impossible to deliver.
Powell didn’t commit to any particular way forward, leaving the door open to additional interest-rate increases while declining to say what would be coming—or when. His closing line, that the central bank would “keep at it until the job is done,” was lifted almost verbatim from the speech he delivered in the same setting a year ago.
And while Fed officials have penciled in one more quarter-point interest-rate hike this year, it remains far from certain whether they will ultimately move forward with it. “Pausing rate hikes now, because you are waiting for long and variable lags to arrive, may leave you standing on the platform waiting for a train that has already left the station,” Waller said at the time.
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