Northern New Jersey is above where it was in 2019. And New York City has also shown remarkable progress, with employment closing in on pre-Covid levels.1 Nationally, we are also seeing improvements on the supply side of the labor market. As you'll recall, when businesses reopened after the 2020 pandemic shutdowns, many faced a dire shortage of workers. Since then, we have seen a rebound in labor force participation, with the 25-to 54-year-old age group slightly above pre-pandemic levels. Although overall participation is below where it was before Covid, economists at the New York Fed have found that this shortfall is more than fully accounted for by the aging—or what I prefer to call "maturing"—of the workforce.2 This increase in labor force participation has helped alleviate some of the imbalance in the labor market. But with baby boomers increasingly reaching retirement age, population aging will continue to put downward pressure on participation in the medium term. Increases in the labor force from immigration, which has picked up from its pandemic lows, can partially offset this, but it is unlikely to to fully undo impact. By continuing use our site, the you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Statement. You can learn more about how we use cookies by reviewing our Privacy Statement. The Force Is a Balance Achieving balance on the inflation side of our mandate has been more challenging. Last June, inflation spiked to a 40-year high of 7 percent, as measured by the personal consumption expenditures (PCE) price index.

But the digitisation of payments is diminishing the role of cash and its capacity to provide an effective monetary anchor. A central bank digital currency would offer a digital, risk-free standard and facilitate convertibility among different forms of private digital money. It would uphold the singleness of money and protect monetary sovereignty. We are advancing with our digital euro project and aim to complete our investigation phase later this year. Furthermore, the tokenisation of digital finance may require central banks to modify their technological infrastructure supporting the issuance of central bank money for wholesale transactions. This could involve establishing a bridge between market distributed ledger technology (DLT) platforms and central bank infrastructures, or a new DLT-based wholesale settlement service with DLT-based central bank money. [41] We will involve the market in the exploratory work that we have recently announced. [42]  Conclusion To conclude, crypto-assets have been promoted as decentralised alternatives promising more resilient financial services. However, the reality does not live up to that promise. The blockchain technology underpinning crypto-assets can be extremely slow, energy-intensive and insufficiently scalable. The practicality of crypto-assets for everyday transactions is low due to their complex handling and significant price volatility. To address these drawbacks, the crypto ecosystem has changed its narrative, favouring more centralised forms of organisation that emphasise crypto speculation and quick profit. But recent events have exposed the fragility of the crypto ecosystem, demonstrating how quickly confidence in crypto-assets can evaporate.