Jerome Powell, Press Conference: September FOMC Post Meeting Press Conference Transcript

“Over coming months, we will be looking for compelling evidence that inflation is moving down, consistent with inflation returning to 2 percent. We anticipate that ongoing increases in the target range for the federal funds rate will be appropriate; the pace of those increases will continue to depend on the incoming data and the evolving outlook for the economy. With today’s action, we have raised interest rates by 3 percentage points this year. At some point, as the stance of monetary policy tightens further, it will become appropriate to slow the pace of increases, while we assess how our cumulative policy adjustments are affecting the economy and inflation.”

“Restoring price stability will likely require maintaining a restrictive policy stance for some time. The historical record cautions strongly against prematurely loosening policy.”

“We have always understood that restoring price stability while achieving a relatively modest decline, or rather increase, in unemployment and a soft landing would be very challenging and we don’t know, no one knows whether this process will lead to a recession or if so, how significant that recession would be. That’s going to depend on how quickly wage and price inflation pressures come down, whether expectations remain anchored, and whether also, do we get more labor supply, which would help as well. In addition, the chances of a soft landing are likely to diminish to the extent that policy needs to be more restrictive or restrictive for longer. Nonetheless, we’re committed to getting inflation back down to 2 percent because we think that a failure to restore price stability would mean far greater pain later on.”

“So, we make one decision per meeting and the decision we made today was to raise the federal funds rate by 75, you’re right that a, the median for the year end suggests another 125 basis points and rate increases but there’s also, there’s a, there’s another fairly large group that saw 100 basis points, in addition to where we are today.”