The Fed Should Prepare for the Unexpected

Officials at the U.S. Federal Reserve are grappling with an important issue: how to deal with the possibility that the economy doesn’t act the way they expect it to. Judging from their analyses, different risks will require different responses — and at least one concern isn’t getting enough attention.

Managing uncertainty was among the big topics of last weekend’s annual economic policy symposium in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, hosted by the Kansas City Fed. Jerome Powell, the new chair of the Board of Governors, emphasized the wide range of uncertainty associated with the Fed’s baseline models. In a separate research paper, a number of high-ranking Fed staffers explored what policy makers should do when they’re not sure how worker scarcity will affect inflation.