We want to see the job gains before we remove any support for the economy, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said at an event at the International Monetary Fund, on Thursday, April 8.
Putting another marker in the ground on when the central bank might start to cut back on its schedule to purchase $120 billion a month in Treasuries and mortgage-backed securities–and then to raise its benchmark interest rate, Powell said the Fed wants to see a string of months like March when the economy added 916,000 jobs.
“We want to see a string of months like that so we can really begin to show progress toward our goals,” Powell said. The Fed chairman did not clarify what would constitute a “string of months.”
In an interview on Bloomberg, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco President Mary Daly echoed Powell’s position. “We said substantial further progress, we have to see it, we don’t have to expect it, we have to see it,” Daly said.
Both Powell and Daly repeated the Fed’s recent stance on inflation: Any uptick is likely to be transitory and would not push the central bank to raise interest rates.
The next meeting of the Fed’s policy-setting Open Market Committee is scheduled April 27 and 28.
