To The Moon

The Federal Reserve is strongly committedto lowering inflationeven though interest-rate increases to restrain economic growth could fuel political blowback, said Chair Jerome Powell.

“Price stability is the bedrock of a healthy economy and provides the public with immeasurable benefits over time,” Mr. Powell said Tuesday in remarks prepared for delivery on panel discussion in Stockholm. “But restoring price stability when inflation is high can require measures that are not popular in the short term as we raise interest rates to slow the economy.”

The Fed’s institutional arrangements—in which policy makers set interest rates without direct control by Congress or the White House, sometimes referred to as its “independence”—allows the central bank “to take these necessary measures without considering short-term political factors,” Mr. Powell said.

Mr. Powell’s prepared remarks didn’t otherwise comment on the Fed’scoming interest-rate decisionsand instead highlighted the importance of central bank independence as well as the steps needed to safeguard that policy-setting autonomy. He addressed a conference focused on central bank independence that was convened by Sweden’s central bank.

The Fed raised its benchmark short-term interest rate aggressively last year, from near zero in March to just below 4.5% by the end of the year. Officials have signaled their intention to lift the rate above 5% this year, extending the fastest sequence of increases since the early 1980s to combat inflation that has also been near a 40-year high.

Mr. Powell was confirmed last spring with broad bipartisan Senate support to a second four-year term as the Fed’s chair. But some senior Democratic lawmakers have more recently voiced alarm at the Fed’s rapid rate rises.

The chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, Sen.Sherrod Brown(D., Ohio), and the top Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, Rep.Maxine Waters(D., Calif.), separately sent letters to Mr. Powell last fall warning against overdoing rate increases. “You must not lose sight of your responsibility to ensure that we have full employment,” Mr. Brown wrote in October.

Other critics have been more outspoken. “There is a big difference between landing a plane and crashing it,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) said at a conference in November. “Powell risks pushing our economy off a cliff.”

Mr. Powell has said the central bank is trying to avoid unnecessary economic damage, including higher unemployment, by slowing the pace of its rate rises. But he has repeatedly warned that there would likely be some pain in bringing down high inflation.

In his remarks, Mr. Powell said he believes the “benefits of independent monetary policy in the U.S. context are well understood and broadly accepted.” He also said grants of independence to regulatory agencies should be “exceedingly rare, explicit, tightly circumscribed, and limited to those issues that clearly warrant protection from short-term political considerations.”

In exchange for such autonomy, Mr. Powell said the Fed “ should ‘stick to our knitting’ and not wander off” into addressing policy issues that aren’t directly linked to its mandate to keep inflation low and to support a strong job market.

Some Democrats and environmental groups have put pressure on the central bank to take a more activist role in policing bank lending decisions to address climate change. Mr. Powell on Tuesday argued for a far more limited role in which the Fed monitors how banks are managing an array of financial risks, including those posed by climate change.

“Without explicit congressional legislation, it would be inappropriate for us to use our monetary policy or supervisory tools to promote a greener economy or to achieve other climate-based goals,” he said. “We are not, and will not be, a ‘climate policy maker.’ ”