Federal Reserve press conference, 2022-11-02 — Chair Jerome Powell

Question (Rachel Siegel, Washington Post): And if I could follow up: Should we interpret the addition to the statement to mean that more weight is put into those lag effects than they would have been after previous rate hikes?
Answer: I think as we move now into restrictive territory, as we make these ongoing rate hikes and policy becomes more restrictive, it’ll be appropriate now to be thinking more about lags. Of course, we think about lags—the lags are just sort of a basic part of monetary policy. But we will be thinking about them, but we won’t be—I think we’ll be considering them but because it’s appropriate to do so. Let me say this: It is very premature to be thinking about pausing. So people, when they hear lags, they think about a pause. It’s very premature, in my view, to think about or be talking about pausing our rate hike. We have a ways to go. Our policy—we need ongoing rate hikes to get to that level of sufficiently restrictive. And we don’t—of course, we don’t really know exactly where that is. We have a sense, and we’ll write down in September—sorry, in the December meeting, a new Summary of Economic Projections, which updates that. But I would expect us to continue to update it based on what we’re seeing with incoming data.