Full unpaywalled transcript of Powell's conference: https://www.wsj.com/articles/transcript-fed-chief-powells-postmeeting-press-conference-11651696613 https://w

Full unpaywalled transcript of Powell's conference: https://www.wsj.com/articles/transcript-fed-chief-powells-postmeeting-press-conference-11651696613 https://www.wsj.com/articles/transcript-fed-chief-powells-po... Relevant section: Q: Your level of confidence that you can slow hiring without pushing the economy into a downturn. MR. POWELL: So I guess I would say it this way. It’s—there’s a path. There’s a path by which we would be able to have demand moderate in the labor market and have—therefore have vacancies come down without unemployment going up, because vacancies are at such an extraordinarily high level. There are 1.9 vacancies for every unemployed person; 11½ million vacancies, 6 million unemployed people. So—and we haven’t been in that place on the vacancy—you know, through the vacancy/unemployed curve, the Beveridge curve. We haven’t been at that sort of level of a ratio in the modern era. So in principle, it seems as though, by moderating demand, we could see vacancies come down, and as a result—and they could come down fairly significantly and I think put supply and demand at least closer together than they are, and that that would give us a chance to have lower—to get inflation—to get wages down and then get inflation down without having to slow the economy and have a recession and have unemployment rise materially. So there’s a path to that. Now, I would say I think we have a good chance to have a soft or softish landing, or outcome, if you will. And I’ll give you a couple of reasons for that. One is, households and businesses are in very strong financial shape. You’re looking at, you know, excess savings on balance sheets; excess in the sense that they’re substantially larger than the prior trend. Businesses are in good financial shape. The labor market is, as I mentioned, very, very strong. And so it doesn’t seem to be anywhere close to a downturn. Therefore, the economy is strong and is well positioned to handle tighter monetary policy. So—but I’ll say I do expect that this will be very challenging. It’s not going to be easy. And it may well depend, of course, on events that are not under our control. But our job is to use our tools to try to achieve that outcome, and that’s what we’re going to do.