Powell warns not all US problems can be solved by Fed

The Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell defended the central bank’s tightening of policy rates and said the US economy was approaching, but not yet at, full employment.

Powell told the Fed’s Jackson Hole gathering on August 24 that the Fed’s senior policy-makers believed they could best address the US’s economic problems “by pursuing the Federal Reserve’s mandate”.

His words came after recent criticisms of the central bank’s monetary policy by US president Donald Trump. In the last two months,