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

user: Chair Powell, Chair Powell. Good afternoon, Michelle and Chair Powell. Craig Torres from Bloomberg. Chair Powell, at the beginning of the conversation, you said risks are two sided. And I’m wondering if you can elaborate on what are the risks to the elusive soft landing. Is Fed policy a risk? Overtightening? Or what are the risks? And then second, Chair Powell, I have a quick administrative question. You know, Robert Kaplan’s disclosure of his securities transactions—and in a couple of months, Chair Powell, or maybe sooner, you and I will file our tax returns. And we’ll list transactions and all kinds of things. And next to those transactions, we’ll put dates. And Bloomberg asked for the dates of Mr. Kaplan’s transactions. The Dallas Fed is not giving us the dates. And I don’t see why this is a matter for the inspector general or anybody else. I mean, why can’t he give us the dates? Will you help us get the dates of those transactions? Thanks.

assistant: So you asked about the risks first. So I—you know, the one risk is that inflation risks are still to the upside in the views of most FOMC participants and, certainly, in my view as well. There’s a risk that, that the high inflation we’re seeing will be prolonged, and there’s a risk that it will move even higher. So we don’t—we don’t think that’s the base case, but you asked what the risks are. And that’s—we have to be in a position with our monetary policy to address all of the plausible outcomes. And that calls for us to be in position. We, we have an expectation about the way the economy is going to be evolved, but we’ve got to be in a position to, to address different outcomes, including the one where inflation remains higher. And, of course, that is a risk to the—to the—to the expansion. You know, we’ve been saying that what we need here is another long expansion, which is the thing we saw over the last one, which was a record long expansion. We saw labor force participation rise. We saw wages persistently higher for people at the lower end, and there, there really was no obvious imbalance in the economy that threatened that expansion. It could have gone on for years were it not hit by the pandemic. So we’d love to find a way to get back to that. That’s going to require price stability, and that’s going to require the Fed to tighten interest rate policy and do our part in getting inflation back down to our 2 percent goal. So I mentioned two-sided risks. You know, a couple things. One, Omi—COVID is not over. And COVID can continue to evolve, and it’s just—we have to accept that it’s not over, and the risks to it can slow down growth. And that would be—that’s a downside risk from a growth standpoint. I would point to—you know, another, another risk is just further, further problems in the supply chains, which could slow down activity. And you see the situation in China as a situation there where that’s—their no-COVID policy may cause more lockdowns, is likely to, and that may play into—may play into more problems in supply chains. In addition, there’s what’s going on in Eastern Europe and things like that. So there’s plenty of risk out there. And we, you know, we can’t—we can’t forget that there are risks on both sides. So that’s, that’s there. That’s what I would say. I know you’ve been all over this issue with, with my colleagues, Craig, on the issue of, of information. We don’t—we don’t have that information at the Board. And, you know, I hand— I asked the inspector general to do an investigation, and that is out of my hands. I play no role in it. I seek to play no role in it. And I don’t—I really—I can’t help you here today on this issue. And I’m sorry I can’t.