Press conference exchange between RACHEL SIEGEL and Fed Chair Jerome Powell:

user: and thank you Chair Powell for taking our questions I’m wondering if you can walk us through expectations you have specifically when it comes to the labor market going into 2023 And I’m curious about people who may have left the labor market who have yet to come back or who may face issues with childcare Perhaps they’ve retired early Any barriers that you see in keeping people from the labor market as you consider full employment going into 2023? Thank you

assistant: Thank you. So I would say, if you look at the labor market and you look at the demand for workers and the level of job creation and think ahead, I think it’s clear, and I am confident, that we are on a path to a very strong labor market—a labor market that, that shows low unemployment, high participation, rising wages for people across the spectrum. I mean, I think that’s, that’s shown in our projections, it’s shown in outside projections. And if you look through the current time frame and think one and two years out, we’re going to be looking at a very, very strong labor market. In terms of exactly what that means, we’ll, we’ll have to see how things evolve. I think we learned during the course of the last very long expansion, the longest in our history, that labor supply during a long expansion can exceed expectations, can move above its estimated trend. And, and I have no reason to think won’t happen again. At the same time, we have seen—in terms of participation, we’ve seen a significant number of, of people retire. And so we, we don’t actually know exactly what labor force participation will be as we go forward, but I, I would tend to, to look at it and think that it—that it can return to high levels, although it may take some time to do that. But overall, this is—this is going to be, you know, a very strong labor market. In terms of the near term, you ask as well—so we see a couple of things, a few things that seem likely to be holding back labor supply. There are very large amounts of job openings, and there are a very large number of people who, who are unemployed. And the pace of, of filling those jobs is—somehow feels slower than it might be. So I’d point to a number of things, the first of which is just that most of the, the act of going back to one’s old job—that’s already happened. So this is a question of people finding a new job. And that’s just a process that takes longer. There may be something of a speed limit on it. You’ve got to find a job where, where your skills match what, you know, what, what the employer wants. It’s got to be in the right area. There’s just a lot that goes into the function of finding a job. So that’s, that’s a natural thing. In addition, I would say that we, we look at, for example, a, a significant number of people still say that they’re concerned about going back to work in jobs where there’s a lot of public facing because of—because of COVID. So that’s clearly holding back some people, and that should diminish as vaccinations move ahead. There’s also the question of childcare. Many are engaged in, in caretaking. And as schools reopen and, and, and childcare/daycare centers open in the fall—in the fall, then we should see—we should see that supporting labor force participation by caretakers. Finally, unemployment insurance for something like 15 million people will either end or be diminished as we move through the summer and into, into, into the fall by the end of September, and I’d like some—that may also encourage some to go back in and take jobs. So you would think would add to an increase in job creation as well. So you put all those together, I would expect that we would see strong job creation building up over the summer and going into—going into the fall. I will also say, though, the last thing I’ll say is, this is an extraordinarily unusual time. And we, we really don’t have a template or, or, you know, any experience of, of a situation like this. And so I think we have to be humble about our ability to understand the data. It’s not a time to try to reach hard conclusions about the labor market, about inflation, about the path of policy. We need to see more data. We need to be a little bit patient. And I do think, though, that we’ll, we’ll, we’ll be seeing some things coming up in coming months that will—that will inform our, our thinking.