Federal Reserve press conference, 2023-05-03 — Chair Jerome Powell

Question (Edward Lawrence, Fox Business): How does the other side of the mandate—the jobs side—once you get to 3 percent, going from 3 to 2, how does the other side of the mandate balance?
Answer: I think they, they—you know, they, they will both matter equally at that point. Right now, you have a labor market that’s still extraordinarily tight. You still got 1.6 job openings, even with the lower job openings number, for every unemployed person. We do see some evidence of softening in labor market conditions. But, overall, you’re near a 50-year low in unemployment. Wages—you all will have seen that the wage number from late last week, and it’s—whenever it was. And, you know, it’s, it’s a couple of percentage points above what would be—what would be consistent with 2 percent inflation over time. So we do see some softening; we see new labor supply coming in. These are very positive developments. But the labor market is very, very strong, whereas inflation is, you know, running high—well above our—well above our goal. And right now, we need to be focusing on bringing inflation down. Fortunately, we’ve been able to do that so far without unemployment going up.