Mary Daly, Speech: Welcome Remarks, Macroeconmics and Monetary Policy Conference

“Now, when I think about the challenges of central banking right now, they’re easy to enumerate, but hard to grasp. So, we start with coming out of a pandemic where central banks offered extraordinary support, along with fiscal agents, to get as many people through the pandemic as possible. And, while in many countries, we’re hoping that we’re moving from pandemic to endemic, we only have to look at parts of Asia to realize that we’re not there yet. So, we still have to grapple with those things and think about how to best support our economies. And at the same time, we have a devastating war in the Ukraine. I would be remiss if I didn’t start by extending my heartfelt sympathy to the Ukrainian people and all the suffering that they’re enduring. But it also affects the economy. It creates uncertainty, it creates challenges in supply chains for commodities, and it puts additional pressure on inflation, which is too high. Higher than most policymakers have as their target for price stability. And that’s true across the globe. But in the United States, we’re at a 40-year high. People are thinking about inflation when they go to bed at night and when they wake up in the morning, and that’s far from our target for price stability.”