Fed’s Powell Affirms Need To Act Strongly To Fight Inflation

Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said the central bank is squarely focused on bringing down high inflation to prevent it from becoming entrenched as it did in the 1970s. From a report: “It is very much our view, and my view, that we need to act now forthrightly, strongly, as we have been doing, and we need to keep at it until the job is done,” Mr. Powell said Thursday morning at a virtual conference hosted by the Cato Institute. Mr. Powell repeated the core themes of his speech at an annual central banking symposium in Jackson Hole, Wyo., two weeks ago. He said he had opted to deliver a “concise and focused message” at that event to underscore the Fed’s overarching commitment to return inflation to its 2% target.

Mr. Powell said the key lesson from the high inflation of the 1970s and the aggressive steps taken by Fed Chairman Paul Volcker in the early 1980s to bring inflation down was the importance of preventing households and businesses from expecting inflation to rise. “The public had really come to think of higher inflation as the norm and to expect it to continue, and that’s what made it so hard to get inflation down in that case,” Mr. Powell said. The takeaway for policy makers, he added, is that “the longer inflation remains well above target, the greater the risk the public does begin to see higher inflation as the norm and that has the capacity to really raise the costs of getting inflation down.”