Powell on "Getting Back to a Strong Labor Market"
- Fed strongly committed to doing all it can to promote employment
- Repeats will keep current pace of bond buying until substantial further progress made toward max employment and price stability
- Improvement in labor market has stalled in past few months
- Renewal of PPP an encouraging development
- Correcting for pandemic effects would push unemployment rate near 10%
- Pre-pandemic we had every reason to believe unemployment could have continued improving without inflation
- Workers and households likely to need continued support
- Getting to and staying at full employment will not be easy
- We will not tighten monetary policy solely in response to a strong labor market
There is nothing remotely hawkish in the text. There will be a Q&A with the moderator at the end of his speech.
The bolded comment highlights how 'all in' that Powell wants to go. The idea is to pledge to be borderline irresponsible and see if they can make inflation happen.
