At Jackson Hole, Powell expected to unveil new 5-year interest rate framework

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell is set to speak Friday in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, at a Fed research conference. As always, traders will be listening for hints about what might happen with interest rates at next month's Fed meeting. That's as a weakening labor market sets the backdrop.

But there's another pressing issue looming over Powell's speech: The central bank is about to launch a new five-year framework for its interest rate strategy.

Every five years, the Fed makes a plan, just like Stalinist countries used to do. Theirs were focused on every detail of the economy. The Fed? It's just trying to figure out how to accomplish its dual mandate of stable prices and maximum employment.

When Fed officials issued the first framework in 2012, "they kept talking about it as a constitution," said Ellen Meade, a former Fed economist now at Duke.

For the first time, central bank officials set 2% as their inflation target; they didn't establish a specific number for unemployment. But a few years later, inflation was stuck below 2%.

So, in 2020, Meade said Fed officials made a big edit: "'We're going to say when we've been really underrunning 2% we're going to try to make up for it by running inflation a bit above 2% for a while so that we average out at 2%.'"

But as anyone who's been to a grocery store lately knows, inflation is now stuck stubbornly above 2%. That 2020 framework was established when low inflation was a problem; it's outdated.

Fed Chair Powell is expected to unveil a new framework in his Friday speech.

"The big edits we see are going to, in all likelihood, be undoing the big edits we saw in 2020," said former Fed economist Claudia Sahm, now with New Century Advisors.

Because now we have stubborn inflation, but nobody knows if we'll see a resurgence of low inflation, Sahm said — so the Fed has to be flexible.