Powell Pledges to Provide Clarity About Tapering Via Advance Notice

Q: Is it correct to see this as the start of the advanced notice process for tapering? How does the recent surge in Covid factor into your thinking?

• A: At this meeting, and in coming meetings, we're going to be continuing to assess the economy's progress toward our goals and give advanced notice. We'll try to provide additional clarity about our thinking, both in the post-meeting statement, and minutes, and public comments that participants make.
• Our approach has been to be as transparent as we can. We have not reached substantial further progress yet, so we're not there. We see ourselves as having some ground to cover to get there.
• On Delta: It will have significant health consequences for many. Rising cases, and some forecasts are for them to rise quite significantly. What we've seen is with successive waves of COVID there has tended to be less in the a way of economic implications from each wave.
• We'll see whether that is the case with Delta. But it's certainly not an unreasonable expectation. So it certainly is plausible that people would pull back from some activities because of the risk of infection (e.g. dining out). We may see economic effects from some of that, or it might weigh on the return to the labor market. We don't have a strong sense of how that will work out, so we'll be monitoring it carefully.