(Finance) – The chairman of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, he is not yet ready to declare that inflation has been defeated. “I have some confidence in that,” Powell said when asked directly during a congressional hearing, but “I’m not ready to say that yet.”
“There is a path to return to full price stability while keeping unemployment low,” Powell said. “We’re there. We are very focused on staying on that path..”
Powell also said that the Fed still has “a long way to go” in reducing the size of its balance sheet with the end point of quantitative easing still uncertain. “We’ve made a lot of progress,” he stressed, “we feel like we have a long way to go.”
In response to a question from a Republican congressman about whether the Fed might cut interest rates at its mid-September meeting, less than two months before Election Day, Powell said: “Our commitment is making decisions when and how necessarybased on data, incoming data, the evolving outlook and the balance of risks, and not taking into account other factors, including political factors.”
“We will make those decisions,” Powell continued. “We have a long history of doing that, including during election years, and that’s what we’re going to do. Everything we do will be well-founded. It’s just It is not appropriate for us to spend time thinking about election cycles.“.