Powell Says Fed Can Do More

Q: How do you further fight the slowdown that you are seeing? Is there more the Fed can do or is it all Congress' realm?

• A: There is more we can do: expand asset purchase programs, a number of options. In the near term, the help that people need isn't just from low interest rates that stimulates demand over time and works with a long and variable lag.
• We have talked about this as all of these government policies trying to work together to create a bridge across this economic chasm that was created by the pandemic. For many Americans that bridge is there and they are across it. There is a group that don't have a bridge yet. That is who we are talk willing about. It's the ten million people who lost their jobs and people who may lose their homes. Small businesses that are just hanging on. Now that we can kind of see the light at the end of the tunnel, it would be bad to see people losing their business, their life's work in many cases or even generations worth of work because they couldn't last another few months, which is what it amounts to.
• We have more we can do. We are going to need to support this economy for quite a period of time. The economy should be growing at a fairly healthy clip by the second half of next year. But it's going to be a while before we are really back to the conditions in the labor market that we had in early this year and for much of the last couple of years. That is how I think about it.