Howard Schneider with Reuters. A question to follow up.
I could, do you consider the current policy rate still
you confident that it's sufficiently restrictive to get inflation back
to 2%?
So I do, I do think the evidence shows you
know pretty clearly that policy is restrictive and is weighing
on demand.
And there are a few places I would point to
for that.
You can start with the labor market.
So demand is still strong,
the demand side of the labor market in particular,
but it's cooled from its extremely high level of a
couple of years ago and you see that in in
job openings.
You saw it more evidence of that today in the
JOLTS report.
As you'll know it's still higher than pre pandemic,
but it has been coming down both in the indeed
report and in the JOLTS report that's that's demand cooling.
The same is true of quits and hiring rates which
have essentially normalized.
I also look at the,
we look at surveys of workers and pardon me surveys
of workers and businesses and ask workers are jobs plentiful
and ask businesses are workers plentiful.
Is it easy to find workers And you've seen that
the answers to those have come back down to pre
pre pandemic levels.
You also see in an intra sensitive spending like housing
and investment,
you also see that higher interest rates are weighing on
those activities.
So I do think it's clear that.
That policy is restrictive, sufficiently restrictive I guess so I
would say.
That we believe it is restrictive and we believe overtime
it will be sufficiently restrictive that will be a question
that that the data will have to answer.
So as a follow up,
if inflation, pardon me, continues running roughly sideways as it
has been,
the job market stays reasonably strong,
unemployment low and expectations are anchored and maintained,
would you disrupt that for expectations are not.
Stable roughly. Would you disrupt that for the last half
point on PCE?
You know, I don't want to get into complicated hypotheticals,
but I would say that,
you know, we're committed to retain retaining our current restrictive
stance of policy for as long as it's appropriate and
we'll do that.