Fed chair pledges to bring inflation under control and signals wariness on wages

Jerome Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, told senators that policymakers were prepared to rein in inflation as they try to fulfill their price stability goal — even if that comes at an economic cost.

“We’re going to use our tools, and we’re going to get this done,” Powell told the Senate Banking Committee on Thursday.

Powell has signaled that the Fed is poised to raise interest rates by a quarter percentage point at its meeting that ends March 16, and follow up with a series of additional rate increases over the next several months. Fed officials are also planning to come up with a strategy for shrinking their vast holdings of government-backed debt, which will increase longer-term interest rates.

The suite of policy changes will be an effort to weigh on demand, tamping down price increases that are running at their fastest pace in 40 years. The Fed aims for 2% price gains on average over time, but inflation came in at 6.1% in the year through January.

Asked if the Fed was prepared to do whatever it took to control inflation — even if that means temporarily harming the economy, as Paul Volcker did when he was Fed chair in the early 1980s — Powell said it was.

“I knew Paul Volcker,” he said during his testimony. “I think he was one of the great public servants of the era — the greatest economic public servant of the era. I hope that history will record that the answer to your question is ‘yes.’”

Volcker’s campaign against double-digit price increases pushed unemployment above 10% in the early 1980s, hurting the economy so severely that wages and prices began to slow down.

But central bankers are hoping that they can engineer a smoother economic cooldown this time around.

They are reacting much faster to high inflation than officials did in the 1960s and 1970s, and data suggests that consumers and businesses, while cognizant of inflation, have not yet come to expect rapid increases year after year. By cooling off demand a little, the Fed’s policies may work together with easing supply chain problems to bring inflation down without tossing people out of jobs.

“Mortgage rates will go up, the rates for car loans — all of those rates that affect consumers’ buying decisions,” Powell said of the way higher rates would work. “Housing prices won’t go up as much, and equity prices won’t go up as much, so people will spend less.”

The goal is to allow factories and businesses to catch up so that shoppers are no longer competing for a limited stock of available goods and services, creating shortages that enable companies to raise prices without scaring voracious buyers away.

“What we hope to achieve is bringing the economy to a level where supply and demand are in sync,” Powell said.

Asked whether the nation might be on the cusp of a wage-price spiral, in which wages and inflation feed on one another, Powell struck a cautious tone.

“That is a serious concern, and one that we monitor carefully,” Powell said, noting that wage increases have been very quick — especially for lower-paid workers — and that whether they become problematic will depend on how persistent they prove to be.

“The big thing we don’t want is to have inflation become entrenched and self-perpetuating,” he said. “That’s why we’re moving ahead with our program to raise interest rates and get inflation under control.”

Powell underlined that the Fed’s plans for policy would be “nimble” in response to uncertainty coming from Ukraine. Economists have said the conflict was likely to push up gas and other commodity prices, further elevating inflation — already, oil prices have shot higher. But at the same time, a combination of higher fuel costs and wavering consumer sentiment could be a drag on economic growth.

But he made clear, repeatedly, that getting price gains back in line was key.

“We need to deliver price stability; we’re not currently doing that,” Powell later added, calling the central bank “very highly motivated to get the economy back to a place where we have inflation under control, but also a strong economy and a strong labor market.”