Jerome Powell: Dollar Strength 'Would Never Be A Major Focus' In Fed Discussions On Interest Rate

During a press briefing on Wednesday, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell was asked about the weakening dollar.

Transcript

00:00Clare Jones, Financial Times. Just a question on the dollar. We've seen it decline quite

00:10heavily this year. I was wondering if there's been any discussion about that at the meetings

00:15and how, to what degree, that may be complicating your attempts to get inflation back to target?

00:20Thank you. So this goes back to the division of labor between the Fed and the Treasury,

00:25as you, I'm sure, know. And, you know, the Treasury only speaks to the dollar. It's not something

00:35that's been a topic of, you know, major discussion at all at the Fed. I wouldn't say it doesn't come

00:43up. The transcripts, when they come out in a few years, they'll probably reflect some mentions of

00:47the dollar, but it would never be a major focus. And just to follow on, if I may to Andrew's question,

00:54I think the amount of imputed data in CPI now is up to 35 percent. I mean, is there any discussion

01:00of that as well? Is there any consideration of looking at alternative measures, data scraping,

01:05and so on, in order to just ensure you've got a good read on what's happening to prices in the U.S.

01:11economy? Thank you. You know, so we're monitoring the situation. We do, of course, I mean, as you know,

01:16during the pandemic, we looked at a whole lot of new kinds of data. People are looking at big data

01:23sets that you can get from all sorts of places. And we do all of that. But we really need, the

01:29government data really is the gold standard in data. And we need it to be, you know, to be good

01:36and be able to rely on it. And we're not going to be able to substitute for that. But we'll have to

01:43make do with what we have. But I certainly hope that we get what we need.

01:48Okay.

01:49Okay.