Powell injects a note of caution
Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said explicitly in his semiannual congressional testimony that he supports a 25 basis point rate hike at the FOMC meeting in two weeks and expects that “a series” of further increases will be necessary over the remainder of the year. He again stressed the robustness in the labor market and repeated that the Fed would tighten more aggressively should inflation fail to dissipate as expected.