Powell Grilled Further on Inflation and Language Choice

Q: Can you define what "a string" of months of strong job creation is, more specifically? And re inflation, why use the term "largely" when describing transitory inflation"?

- A: I can tell you what it's not - it's not one really good employment reading which is what we got in March. We got close to a million jobs in March. I was just suggesting (re "a string") that we would want to see more like that.

• We're 8.5 million jobs below where we were in Feb 2020. That doesn't account for growth in the labor force or the economy, the trend we were on. We're a long way from our goals. We don't have to get all the way to our goals to taper asset purchases. We just need to make substantial further progress. It's going to take some time.
• On "largely", there are a bunch of factors. We were thinking of the base effects and the energy effects. I wasn't meaning to say there were some real effects. There are relative prices going up and down within inflation. There's a basket for CPI or PCE.
• There are many, many, many factors that go into it. Relative factors go up and down. We think it's fair to say that the inflation we see and are about to see later this week are largely due to base effects. It would have been more contentious to say "entirely" on base effects. We just said "largely".