Fed’s Powell: Committed to Inflation Fight, Not Trying to Trigger Recession

Fed’s Powell: Committed to Inflation Fight, Not Trying to Trigger Recession
Federal Reserve Board Chairman Jerome Powell during a news conference in Washington on June 15, 2022. Elizabeth Frantz/Reuters
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The Federal Reserve is not trying to engineer a recession to stop inflation but is fully committed to bringing prices under control even if doing so risks an economic downturn, U.S. central bank chief Jerome Powell said on Wednesday.

“We are not trying to provoke, and I don’t think we will need to provoke, a recession,” Powell said at a hearing before the U.S. Senate Banking Committee, although he acknowledged that a recession was “certainly a possibility” and events in the last few months around the world had made it more difficult to reduce inflation without causing one.