Press conference exchange between CRAIG TORRES and Fed Chair Jerome Powell:

user: Hi, Chair Powell. Craig Torres from Bloomberg. Two questions today. Did you learn anything about what Americans think about the economy from the election results? First question. Second question—I want to talk about some labor market indicators, and I do so with great respect for your attentiveness to the maximum-employment side of the mandate, Chair Powell. So the unemployment rate has been at 4 percent or higher for six months. One of the broadest measures of unemployment is up about a half a point from a year ago. Compensation gains are sliding back. The quits rate, a signal of labor market dynamism, has been heading down to that bad neighborhood of the 20-teens. So you have put a marker at Jackson Hole saying any “further cooling” is unwelcome. It is cooling, generally, a little bit further. So at what point do we reach what you would describe as a shortfall from maximum employment? Thank you.

assistant: Sure. So on your first question, I’m not going to talk about anything that relates directly or indirectly to the election. On the second one, you’re—you know, this is the great question, and it’s the one we think about all the time. So I’ll just say a couple things. You know, there’s nothing really surprising here. What we know is that the unemployment rate is low. We also know that it’s come down significantly—sorry, moved up significantly from a year or so ago. So we’ve seen a big change upward in unemployment. Sometimes that has meant bad things. So far, it doesn’t appear to be. It appears that the—I wouldn’t say that the labor market has fully stabilized, because I do think it’s continuing to very gradually cool, but it seems to be in a good place. And our policy, of course, is designed to keep it in that good place, to maintain the strength in the labor market, while also enabling further progress on inflation. You know, you mentioned a bunch of, of indicators, and you’re right. You know, the, the openings to unemployment rate is back to a normal level. I would—I would characterize it more broadly as “normalizing.” You mentioned wages. Wages are still running just a bit above where they would need to be to be consistent with 2 percent inflation, unless productivity is going to remain at this high level. If we see the—if we see productivity, you know, more sustainably at these high levels, then that would sustain higher wage gains. So I would say—in fact, you can say it the other way, that, that wage increases are now consistent with 2 percent inflation given current productivity readings. But, of course, you know, the lore on productivity readings is whenever you see high readings, you should assume they’re going to revert pretty quickly to the longer-term trend. That has always been the case for 50 years. But, you know, it may be that—we’re now five years. If you look at the NIPA revisions that came out a month ago, we’re five years into, into a nice set of productivity readings, which are sustained and very healthy. But, overall, it’s a good labor market. We could talk about 20 different data series. We’ll be looking at all of them, of course. But, you know, we don’t want the labor market to, to soften much from here. We don’t think we need that to happen to get inflation back to 2 percent.