Tom Barkin

The world I've described is one where the labor market is weakening.

It's a low hiring environment.

But the labor supply is also short.

And you have to be very attentive to that balance because it could get out of balance, right?

Similarly, on the inflation side, you do have these cost pressures and four and a half years of inflation over target.

On the other hand, you're not seeing that show up in spikes in inflation in the real-time numbers.

We are seeing what seems to be a productivity boom.

And so I think you have to be very attentive to how little we know about how each of our mandate variables is going to play out.

And so I feel like very adaptive is the way to think about it, and that's part of why I'm not being prescriptive into, well, it's this many cuts over this period of time, because I think we're going to see and learn a lot as we go here.