WASHINGTON — Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell on Wednesday reinforced a message that the Fed is paying growing attention to a slowing job market and not only to taming inflation, a shift that signals it's likely to begin cutting interest rates soon.
On Tuesday, when Powell addressed the Senate Banking Committee, he suggested that the Fed had made “considerable progress” toward its goal of defeating the worst inflation spike in four decades and noted that cutting rates “too late or too little could unduly weaken economic activity and employment."“For a long time," Powell said Wednesday, “we’ve had to focus on the inflation mandate.