Challenges for Monetary Policy
by Chair Jerome H. Powell
Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, Jackson Hole, Wyoming
This year’s symposium topic is “Challenges for Monetary Policy,” and for the Federal Reserve those challenges flow from our mandate to foster maximum employment and price stability. From this perspective, our economy is now in a favorable place, and I will describe how we are working to sustain these conditions in the face of significant risks we have been monitoring.
The current U.S. expansion has entered its 11th year and is now the longest on record.1 The unemployment rate has fallen steadily throughout the expansion and has been near half-century lows since early 2018. But that rate alone does not fully capture the benefits of this historically strong job market. Labor force participation by people in their prime working years has been rising. While unemployment for minorities generally remains higher than for the workforce as a whole, the rate for African Americans, at 6 percent, is the lowest since the government began tracking it in 1972. For the past few years, wages have been increasing the most for people at the lower end of the wage scale. People who live and work in low- and middle-income communities tell us that this job market is the best anyone can recall. We increasingly hear reports that employers are training workers who lack required skills, adapting jobs to the needs of employees with family responsibilities, and offering second chances to people who need one.
Inflation has been surprisingly stable during the expansion: not falling much when the economy was weak and not rising much as the expansion gained strength. Inflation ran close to our symmetric 2 percent objective for most of last year but has been running somewhat below 2 percent this year.
Thus, after a decade of progress toward maximum employment and price stability, the economy is close to both goals. Our challenge now is to do what monetary policy can do to sustain the expansion so that the benefits of the strong jobs market extend to more of those still left behind, and so that inflation is centered firmly around 2 percent.
Today I will explore what history tells us about sustaining long, steady expansions. A good place to start is with the passage of the Employment Act of 1946, which stated that it is the “continuing policy and responsibility of the Federal Government … to promote maximum employment, production, and purchasing power.”2 Some version of these goals has been in place ever since. I will divide the history since World War II into three eras organized around some well-known “Greats.” The first era comprises the postwar years through the Great Inflation. The second era brought the Great Moderation but ended in the Great Recession. The third era is still under way, and time will tell what “Greats” may emerge.
Each era presents a key question for the Fed and for society more generally. The first era raises the question whether a central bank can resist the temptations that led to the Great Inflation. The second era raises the question whether long expansions supported by better monetary policy inevitably lead to destabilizing financial excesses like those seen in the Great Moderation. The third era confronts us with the question of how best to promote sustained prosperity in a world of slow global growth, low inflation, and low interest rates. Near the end of my remarks, I will discuss the current context, and the ways these questions are shaping policy.
Era I, 1950–1982: Policy Breeds Macroeconomic Instability and the Great Inflation
The late 1940s were a period of adjustment to a peacetime economy. As the 1940s turned to the 1950s, the state of knowledge about how best to promote macroeconomic stability was limited. The 1950s and early 1960s saw the economy oscillating sharply between recession and growth above 6 percent (figure 1, panel A). Three expansions and contractions came in quick succession. With the benefit of hindsight, the lack of stability is generally attributed to “stop and go” stabilization policy, as monetary and fiscal authorities grappled with how best to modulate the use of their blunt but powerful tools.3
Beginning in the mid-1960s, “stop and go” policy gave way to “too much go and not enough stop”—not enough, that is, to quell rising inflation pressures. Both inflation and inflation expectations ratcheted upward through four expansions until the Fed, under Chairman Paul Volcker, engineered a definitive stop in the early 1980s (figure 1, panel C). Each of the expansions in the Great Inflation period ended with monetary policy tightening in response to rising inflation.
Policymakers came out of the Great Inflation era with a clear understanding that it was essential to anchor inflation expectations at some low level. But many believed that central bankers would find it difficult to ignore the temptation of short-term employment gains at the cost of higher inflation down the road.4
