WASHINGTON (AP) — The Federal Reserve delivered its bluntest reckoning Wednesday of what it will take to finally tame painfully high inflation: Slower growth, higher unemployment and potentially a recession.

Speaking at a news conference, Chair Jerome Powell acknowledged what many economists have been saying for months: That the Fed’s goal of engineering a “soft landing” — in which it would manage to slow growth enough to curb inflation but not so much as to cause a recession — looks increasingly unlikely.

“The chances of a soft landing,” Powell said, “are likely to diminish” as the Fed steadily raises borrowing costs to slow the worst streak of inflation in four decades. “No one knows whether this process will lead to a recession or, if so, how significant that recession would be.”

Before the Fed’s policymakers would consider halting their rate hikes, he said, they would have to see continued slow growth, a “modest” increase in unemployment and “clear evidence” that inflation is moving back down to their 2% target.

“We have got to get inflation behind us,” Powell said. “I wish there were a painless way to do that. There isn’t.”

Powell’s remarks followed another substantial three-quarters of a point rate hike — its third straight — by the Fed’s policymaking committee. Its latest action brought the Fed’s key short-term rate, which affects many consumer and business loans, to 3% to 3.25%. That’s its highest level since early 2008.

Falling gas prices have slightly lowered headline inflation, which was a still-painful 8.3% in August compared with a year earlier. Those declining prices at the gas pump might have contributed to a recent rise in President Joe Biden’s public approval ratings, which Democrats hope will boost their prospects in the November midterm elections.

On Wednesday, the Fed officials also forecast more jumbo-size hikes to come, raising their benchmark rate to roughly 4.4% by year’s end — a full point higher than they had envisioned as recently as June. And they expect to raise the rate again next year, to about 4.6%. That would be the highest level since 2007.

By raising borrowing rates, the Fed makes it costlier to take out a mortgage or an auto or business loan. Consumers and businesses then presumably borrow and spend less, cooling the economy and slowing inflation.

In their quarterly economic forecasts, the Fed’s policymakers also projected that economic growth will stay weak for the next few years, with unemployment rising to 4.4% by the end of 2023, up from its current level of 3.7%. Historically, economists say, any time unemployment has risen by a half-point over several months, a recession has always followed.

“So the (Fed’s) forecast is an implicit admission that a recession is likely, unless something extraordinary happens,” said Roberto Perli, an economist at Piper Sandler, an investment bank.

Fed officials now foresee the economy expanding just 0.2% this year, sharply lower than their forecast of 1.7% growth just three months ago. And they envision sluggish growth below 2% from 2023 through 2025. Even with the steep rate hikes the Fed foresees, it still expects core inflation — which excludes volatile food and gas costs — to be 3.1% at the end of 2023, well above its 2% target.

Powell warned in a speech last month that the Fed’s moves will “bring some pain” to households and businesses. And he added that the central bank’s commitment to bringing inflation back down to its 2% target was “unconditional.”

Short-term rates at a level the Fed is now envisioning will force many Americans to pay much higher interest payments on a variety of loans than in the recent past. Last week, the average fixed mortgage rate topped 6%, its highest point in 14 years, which helps explain why home sales have tumbled. Credit card rates have reached their highest level since 1996, according to Bankrate.com.

Inflation now appears increasingly fueled by higher wages and by consumers’ steady desire to spend and less by the supply shortages that had bedeviled the economy during the pandemic recession. On Sunday, Biden said on CBS’ “60 Minutes” that he believed a soft landing for the economy was still possible, suggesting that his administration’s recent energy and health care legislation would lower prices for pharmaceuticals and health care.

The law may help lower prescription drug prices, but outside analyses suggest it will do little to immediately bring down overall inflation. Last month, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office judged it would have a “negligible” effect on prices through 2023. The University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Wharton Budget Model went even further to say “the impact on inflation is statistically indistinguishable from zero” over the next decade.

Even so, some economists are beginning to express concern that the Fed’s rapid rate hikes — the fastest since the early 1980s — will cause more economic damage than necessary to tame inflation. Mike Konczal, an economist at the Roosevelt Institute, noted that the economy is already slowing and that wage increases — a key driver of inflation — are levelling off and by some measures even declining a bit.

Surveys also show that Americans are expecting inflation to ease significantly over the next five years. That is an important trend because inflation expectations can become self-fulfilling: If people expect inflation to ease, some will feel less pressure to accelerate their purchases. Less spending would then help moderate price increases.

The Fed’s rapid rate hikes mirror steps that other major central banks are taking, contributing to concerns about a potential global recession. The European Central Bank last week raised its benchmark rate by three-quarters of a percentage point. The Bank of England, the Reserve Bank of Australia and the Bank of Canada have all carried out hefty rate increases in recent weeks.

And in China, the world’s second-largest economy, growth is already suffering from the government’s repeated COVID lockdowns. If recession sweeps through most large economies, that could derail the U.S. economy, too.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, fresh off winning Senate confirmation for a second term earlier in the day, acknowledged for the first time Thursday that high inflation and economic weakness overseas could thwart his efforts to avoid causing a recession.

For weeks, Powell has portrayed the Fed’s drive to raise interest rates as consistent with a so-called “soft landing” for the economy. Under that scenario, the Fed would manage to tighten borrowing costs enough to cool the economy and curb inflation without going so far as to tip the economy into recession.

But in an interview on NPR’s “Marketplace,” Powell conceded that that balancing act — which many economists have said they doubt the Fed can achieve — could be undercut by economic slowdowns in Europe and China.

“The question whether we can execute a soft landing or not — it may actually depend on factors that we don’t control,” the Fed chair said. “There are huge events, geopolitical events going on around the world, that are going to play a very important role in the economy in the next year or so.”

Such comments reflect less confidence in avoiding a recession than Powell has previously conveyed. Just last week, he said at a news conference: “I think we have a good chance to have a soft or softish landing or outcome.”

On Thursday, he said that slowing inflation to the Fed’s 2% annual target — from its current 6.6%, according to the central bank’s preferred measure — “will also include some pain, but ultimately the most painful thing would be if we were to fail to deal with it and inflation were to get entrenched in the economy at high levels.”

Europe’s economies are suffering from high inflation, exacerbated by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the resulting spike in natural gas and oil prices. Europe has been far more dependent on Russian energy supplies than the United States has been.

China’s strict COVID lockdown policies have shut down ports, hindering exports and slowing consumer spending in cities like Shanghai, where millions of Chinese have been largely restricted to their homes for weeks.

In his interview with NPR, Powell also seemed to suggest that the Fed would at least consider raising its benchmark rate by an extremely large three-quarters of a point if inflation failed to show signs of easing in the coming months. Last week, the stock market initially soared when Powell appeared to take a three-quarter-point rate hike off the table.

After repeating his comment from last week that half-point hikes were likely at each of the next two Fed meetings, in June and July, Powell added Thursday: “If things come in better than we expect, then we’re prepared to do less. If they come in worse than when we expect, then we’re prepared to do more.”

When asked if “do more” meant a three-quarter point hike, Powell said: “You’ve seen this committee adapt to the incoming data and the evolving outlook. And that’s what we’ll continue to do.”

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell says that the appearance of a new COVID-19 variant could slow the economy and hiring, while also raising uncertainty about inflation.

The recent increase in delta cases and the emergence of the omicron variant “pose downside risks to employment and economic activity and increased uncertainty for inflation,” Powell said Monday in prepared remarks to be delivered to the Senate Banking Committee on Tuesday. The new variant could also worsen supply chain disruptions, he said.

Powell’s comments come after other Fed officials in recent weeks have said the central bank should consider winding down its ultra-low interest rate policies more quickly than it currently plans. They cited concerns about inflation, which has jumped to three-decade highs.

Yet Powell’s remarks suggest that the additional uncertainty raised by the omicron variant may complicate the Fed’s next steps.

“Greater concerns about the virus could reduce people’s willingness to work in person, which would slow progress in the labor market and intensify supply-chain disruptions,” Powell said.

While little is known definitively about the health effects of the omicron variant. If it were to cause Americans to pull back on spending and slow the economy, that could ease inflation pressures in the coming months.

Yet if the new variant causes another wave of factory shutdowns in China, Vietnam or other Asian countries, that could worsen supply chain snarls, particularly if Americans keep buying more furniture, appliances and other goods. That, in turn, could push prices even higher in the coming months.

Powell acknowledged that inflation “imposes significant burdens, especially on those less able to meet the higher costs of essentials like food, housing, and transportation.”

He said most economists expect inflation to subside over time, as supply constraints ease, but added that, “factors pushing inflation upward will linger well into next year.” At a news conference last month, Powell said high inflation could persist into late summer.

At their last meeting November 2-3, Fed policymakers agreed to start reducing the central bank’s $120 billion in monthly bond purchases by $15 billion a month. That would bring the purchases to an end in June.

Those bond buys, an emergency measure that began last year, are intended to hold down longer-term interest rates to encourage more borrowing and spending. The Fed has pegged its short-term interest rate, which influences other borrowing costs such as for mortgages and credit cards, at nearly zero since last March, when COVID-19 first erupted.

Last week, the Fed released minutes from the November meeting that showed some of the 17 Fed policymakers supported reducing the bond purchases more quickly, particularly if inflation worsens. That would give the Fed the opportunity to hike its benchmark rate as early as the first half of next year.

At that time, investors expected three rate hikes next year, but the odds of that many hikes have fallen sharply since the appearance of the new coronavirus variant.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — The spread of the COVID-19 delta variant is raising infections, leading some companies and governments to require vaccinations and raising concerns about the U.S. economic recovery.

But on Wednesday, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell injected a note of reassurance, suggesting that the delta variant poses little threat to the economy, at least so far.

“What we’ve seen is with successive waves of COVID over the past year and some months now,” Powell said at a news conference, “there has tended to be less in the way of economic implications from each wave. We will see whether that is the case with the delta variety, but it’s certainly not an unreasonable expectation.”

Powell spoke after the Fed ended its latest policy meeting in which it it signaled, for the first time since the pandemic began to ease, that the economy is moving closer to the “substantial further progress” it wants to see before reducing the $120 billion in Treasury and mortgage bonds it is buying each month — purchases that are intended to lower rates on longer-term consumer and business loans to spur more borrowing and spending.

A reduction in those purchases would represent the start of a gradual pullback in the Fed’s support for the economy. Only after the bond purchases had been pulled back is the Fed expected to begin considering raising its benchmark interest rates from zero, where it’s been since the pandemic erupted in March last year.

At his news conference, Powell acknowledged that the quickening spread of the highly contagious delta variant was threatening some areas of the nation where vaccinations are low, and he noted that “some forecasts are for them to rise quite significantly.”

And he said that as the virus spreads, some consumers might pull back from the spending that has propelled the rapid rebound from the pandemic recession.

“Dining out, traveling, some schools might not reopen,” he said. “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.”

But Powell noted that last summer’s wave of infections had inflicted less damage to the economy that many analysts had forecast.

“We’ve kind of learned to live with it, a lot of industries have kind of improvised their way around it,” Powell added. “It seems like we’ve learned to handle this.”

The statement the Fed issued after its latest policy meeting said that ongoing vaccinations were helping to support the economy. But it dropped a sentence it had included after its previous meeting that said those vaccinations have reduced the spread of COVID-19.

The central bank is keeping its benchmark short-term rate pegged near zero, where it has remained since the pandemic tore through the economy in March 2020. The Fed will also continue to buy $120 billion in Treasury and mortgage bonds each month — purchases that are intended to lower rates on longer-term consumer and business loans to spur more borrowing and spending.

The Fed’s latest policy statement comes as the economy is sustaining a strong recovery from the pandemic recession, with solid hiring and spending.

That improvement, and a pickup in inflation, are key reasons why Powell and other Fed policymakers are believed to be moving closer toward pulling back their economic support. Consumer prices jumped 5.4% in June from a year ago, the biggest increase in 13 years. And a separate inflation gauge the Fed prefers has risen 3.9% in the past year.

Last month’s inflation surge marked a fourth straight month of unexpectedly large price increases, heightening fears that higher costs will erode the value of recent pay raises and undermine the economic recovery. But in its statement, the Fed again expressed its belief that the increase in inflation largely reflects “transitory factors.”

Among Fed watchers and investors, there is some concern that the central bank will end up responding too late and too aggressively to high inflation by quickly jacking up interest rates and potentially causing another recession. Earlier this month, Republicans in Congress peppered Powell with questions about inflation.

But at his news conference, Powell said that if “we were to see inflation moving up to levels persistently that were above significantly, materially above our goal … we would use our tools to guide inflation back down” to the Fed’s target average inflation of 2% annually.

After a period of broad agreement during the pandemic crisis, the Fed’s policymakers appear divided over how soon to bein tapering its bond purchases. Several regional Fed bank presidents support tapering soon, including James Bullard of the St. Louis Fed, Patrick Harker of the Philadelphia Fed and Robert Kaplan of the Dallas Fed.

But Powell has said that the central bank wants to see “substantial further progress” toward its goals of maximum employment and price stability before it would consider reducing the bond purchases. To make up for years of inflation remaining below 2%, the Fed wants inflation to moderately exceed its 2% average inflation target and to show signs of remaining above that level for an unspecified time.

In recent months, as consumer demand has exceeded the supply of goods and services in some industries, inflation — led by sharp price increases for things like used and new cars, hotel rooms and airline tickets — has topped 2%.

It’s not yet clear how the highly contagious and fast-spreading delta variant of the coronavirus might affect the U.S. or global economies or how the job market will fare in coming months. Hiring could accelerate in September as schools reopen, more parents are able to take jobs and expanded unemployment aid programs expire.

Powell has said the Fed will communicate its intention to taper “well in advance” of doing so. Many economists think that signal will occur in late August or September.

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