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

user: Hi, Chair Powell. Rachel Siegel from the Washington Post. Thanks for taking our questions. You’re describing this view that you don’t think you’re behind when it comes to the job market. Can you walk us through the specific data points that you found to be most helpful in the discussions at this meeting? You’ve mentioned a couple, but would you be able to walk us through what that dashboard told you, as far as what about the job market now?

assistant: Sure. So we’ll start with unemployment, which is the single most important one probably. You’re at 4.2 percent. That’s, you know—I know it’s higher than we were used to seeing, numbers in the mid- and even below mid-3s last year, but, if you look back over the sweep of the years, that’s, that’s a low. That’s a very healthy unemployment rate. And anything in the low 4s is, is a really—is a good labor market. So that’s one thing. Participation is at high levels. It’s, you know—we’ve had—we’re right—adjusted for demographics for aging, participation’s at pretty high levels. That’s a good thing. Wages are still a bit above what would be their—wage increases, rather, are still just a bit above where they would be over the very longer term to be consistent with 2 percent inflation, but they’re very much coming down to what that sustainable level is. So we feel good about that. Vacancies over—per unemployed is back to what is still a very strong level. It’s not as high as it was. That number reached two to one, two vacancies for every unemployed person. As measured, it’s now below—it’s around one. But that’s still—that’s still a very good number, I would say. You know, quits have come back down to normal levels. I mean, I could go on and on. There are many, many employment indicators. What do they say? They say this is still a solid labor market. The question isn’t the level; the question is that there has been change, particularly over the last few months, and, you know, so what we say is, as the risks, the upside risks, to inflation have really come down, the downside risks to employment have increased. And, and because we have been patient and held our fire on cutting while, while inflation has come down, I think we’re now in a very good position to manage the risks to both of our goals.

user: And what do you expect to learn between now and November that will help inform the scale of the cut at the next meeting?

assistant: You know, more data, the usual. Don’t look for anything else. We’ll see another labor report. We’ll see another jobs report. I think we get a—we might, actually— we get two—we get a second jobs report on the day of the meeting, I think, or no, no, on the Friday before the meeting. So—and inflation data. We’ll get all this data. We’ll be watching. You know, it’s always a question of, look at the incoming data and ask what are the implications of that data for the evolving outlook and the balance of risks and then go through our process and think, what’s the right thing to do? Is policy where we want it to be to foster the achievement of our goals over time? So that’s what it is, and that’s what we’ll be doing.