Fed Governor Lael Brainard said she’s “attentive to the risks on both sides” regarding the economy now. “I will carefully monitor inflation and indicators of inflation expectations for any signs that longer-term inflation expectations are evolving in unwelcome ways,” she added.
But she added, “while the level of inflation in my near-term outlook has moved somewhat higher, my expectation for the contour of inflation moving back towards its underlying trend in the period beyond the reopening remains broadly unchanged.”
“Relative to the entrenched inflation dynamics that existed before the pandemic, the sharp temporary increases in some categories of goods and services seem unlikely to leave an imprint on longer-run inflation behavior,” she said.
“Today employment remains far from our goal,” she added. “Jobs are down by over 8 million relative to their pre-pandemic level, and the shortfall is over 10 million jobs if we take into account the secular job growth that would have occurred over the past year.”
