Economists believe that when Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell speaks on Friday at the annual Jackson Hole research conference, he will need to thread a needle between signaling what the central bank must do soon regarding interest rates and what it needs to do with rates over the longer run.
Addressing those questions means conditioning market expectations for the size of an almost certain interest rate increase in September, and what the Fed plans to do with rates longer term when recession worries are running high and markets are already considering rate cuts.
