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Powell’s Fed Faces a New Question About Inflation
Under the leadership of former chair Janet Yellen, the Federal Reserve successfully identified 2017’s slowdown in inflation as transitory. Now with tariffs threatening to accelerate inflation, the Fed faces the opposite question: Is faster inflation just another transitory phenomenon? If Yellen’s successor, Jerome Powell, can’t repeat her ability to distinguish between persistent and temporary inflationary forces, then expect the ride to get much bumpier, ending with either a recession or high inflation — or a combination of both. When inflation rates fell in 2017, the Fed adopted the view that the decline ... (full story)