Federal Reserve press conference, 2022-07-27 — Chair Jerome Powell

Question (Catarina Saraiva, Bloomberg): Hi, Chair Powell. Hi. Catarina Saraiva, Bloomberg News. I wanted to ask a little bit more about the 75 basis points versus 50 versus 25. Can you talk a little bit about what, what kind of goes into your thinking for, you know, making the decision on how much to raise rates and, you know, just talking about a very large amount that you alluded to? Could that possibly be 100 basis points? And then, kind of along those lines, is there any sort of weakness in the economy, outside of inflation measures, that would lead you to slow your hiking pace?
Answer: So I’m going to—I’m going to take that as a question about the next meeting and thereafter. So, as I mentioned, we’re going to be looking at all of those things: activity, labor market, inflation. And we’re going to be thinking about our policy stance and where does it really need to be. And I also mentioned that, as this process—now that we’re at neutral—as the process goes on, at some point, it will be appropriate to, to slow down. And we haven’t made a decision when that point is, but intuitively that makes sense, right? We’ve been front-end-loading these very large rate increases, and now we’re getting closer to where we need to be. So that’s how we’re thinking about it. And in terms of September, we’re going—we’re going to watch the data and the evolving outlook very carefully and factor in everything and make a decision in September about what to do. And I’m not really going to provide any specific guidance about what that might be. So, you know, but I mentioned that we might do another unusually large rate increase. But that’s not a decision that we’ve made at all. So we are—you know, we’re going to be guided by the data. And I think you can still think of the, the destination as broadly in line with the September—sorry, the June SEP, because it’s only six weeks old. And sometimes, sometimes SEPs can get old really quick. I think in this one—this one I would say is probably, probably the best guide we have as to where the Committee thinks it needs to get at the end of the year and then into next year. So I would point you to that.