Federal Reserve press conference, 2020-03-03 — Chair Jerome Powell

Question (Nick Timiraos, Wall Street Journal): Thank you. Nick Timiraos with the Wall Street Journal. Two questions. First, what changed between last week, when many of your colleagues seemed to indicate it was still too soon to tell how this might influence the outlook—what changed between last week and today? And then, how much confidence do you have that there will be a quick and relatively complete recovery of economic activity after the peak of this virus has passed?
Answer: So, what changed? Of course, we’ve been carefully monitoring the situation since it first became known and waiting to see how it would evolve. And I think we’ve come to the view now that this—that it is time for us to act in support of the economy. And once you reach that decision, we decided to go ahead. So what changed, really, was, I would say, over the course of the last couple weeks, we’ve seen a broader spread of the virus—we’ve seen it begin to spread a bit here in the United States. But, for us, what really matters, of course, is not the epidemiology, but the risk to the economy. So we saw a risk to the outlook for the economy and chose to act. In terms of my confidence that we will return to—what was your question? Was that a question?

Question (Brendan Greeley, Financial Times): Thank you. Brendan Greeley, Financial Times. Has the Committee discussed any other monetary policy tools, in addition to rate cuts, and the pacing and timing of when they might be appropriate?
Answer: Well, as you know, we’re in the middle of a review of all of our tools. So if you go back a few meetings, we’ve talked about what our toolkit is, and we’ve put that in the minutes. But in the current context, no. What we discussed is the current stance of policy, is it appropriate—came to the view that it was appropriate to make a change and went ahead and did that today.