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. How would you characterize the debate around another hike or holding steady? Is it discussion around lag times, fear of too much slowing, too little slowing? Could you walk us through what this disagreement was about at the meeting?

assistant: Yeah. So the proposal at the meeting was to—was to maintain our current policy stance, and, and I think there was obviously unanimous support for that. But this, of course, is an SEP meeting, and so people write down what they think. And you’ve got—you have some—you saw, I think—seven wrote down no hike at this—at this meeting—or between now and the end of the year. And I think 12 wrote down another single hike in one of the next two meetings that we have between the end of the year. So it wasn’t like we were arguing over that—people just stating their positions—and, really, what, what people are saying is, “Let’s see how the data come in.” You know, we, we want to see— what we want to see. We want to see that, that this, this—these good inflation readings that we’ve been seeing for the last three months—we want to see that it’s more than just three months, right? We want to see, you know—the, the labor market report that we received, the last one that we received, was a good example of what we do—of what we do want to see. It was a combination of, of, you know, of—across a broad range of indicators, continuing rebalancing of the labor market. So those are the two things—so those are our two mandate variables, and, and that’s, that’s the progress that we want to see. But I think people—they want to be convinced, you know—they want to be careful to—not to jump to a conclusion, really, one way or the other—but just be convinced that the data, you know, support that conclusion. And that’s why, given how far we’ve come and how quickly we’ve come, we’re actually in a position to be able to proceed carefully as we assess the incoming data and the evolving outlooks and risks and make these decisions meeting by meeting.

user: I see. And, in your view, what would—I know nothing has been decided yet—but what would one more hike at the end of the year do to the economy or to inflation? And on the other side, what would no hike do, if you could game that out for us?

assistant: So, you know, you, you can make the argument that one hike one way or the other won’t matter. But, for us, we’re, we’re trying—obviously, as a group, it’s a pretty tight cluster of, of where we think that, that policy stance might be, but we’re always going to be learning from data. You know, we’ve learned all through the course of the last year that, actually, we needed to go further than we had thought. If you go back a year—and what we thought, what we wrote down—it’s actually gotten higher and higher. So we, we don’t really know until—and that’s why, again, we—we’re in a position to proceed carefully at this point. A year ago, we proceeded pretty quickly to get rates up. Now—now we’re fairly close, we think, to where we need to get. It’s, it’s just a question of reaching the right stance. I wouldn’t attribute huge importance to one hike in, in macroeconomic terms. Nonetheless, you know, we need—we need to get to a place where we’re confident that we have a stance that will bring inflation down to 2 percent over time. That’s what we need to get to, and we’ve been—you know, we’ve been moving toward it. As we’ve gotten closer to it, we’ve slowed the pace at which we’ve moved. I think that was appropriate. And now that we’re getting closer, we, we— again, we have the ability to proceed carefully.