U.S. Federal Reserve officials say they want to use monetary policy to promote an inclusive economy, but so far they’ve shied away from describing what such an economy might look like.

For now, forecasters say they expect the U.S. central bank won’t begin raising interest rates until 2023, when national unemployment will have sunk to 3.6 percent and Black unemployment to 6.1 percent — roughly where those numbers were in early 2020, right before the pandemic struck. That’s according to the median estimates of the 16 economists who made predictions for both metrics in a recent Bloomberg survey.

But Fed Chair Jerome Powell, who is currently awaiting word from the White House about whether he will be reappointed when his term expires early next year, will get a chance to clarify whether those kinds of numbers would meet his definition of “inclusive” when he takes questions from reporters today following a two-day policy meeting.

“At some point, they can’t actually punt on the question of the Black unemployment rate,” said Claudia Sahm, a former Fed economist who participated in the survey. “The closer they get to liftoff, the more and more they are going to be forced to come up with something.”

It’s a key question for the year ahead as the U.S. central bank gears up to begin winding down the bond-buying program it launched at the onset of the pandemic in 2020, and then start raising its benchmark federal funds rate, which it slashed to nearly zero at same time. Two important developments since then have thrust Fed-watchers trying to predict where monetary policy is headed next into uncharted territory.

First, in August 2020 — following a 20-month internal review of its rate-setting strategy and a wave of protests against racial inequality across the country following the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis — the Fed redefined the “maximum employment” mandate that Congress gave it in 1977 to be “broad-based and inclusive goal.”

In other words, a low national unemployment rate is no longer sufficient for declaring “mission accomplished” — Fed officials now want to see low-income communities benefiting from a strong economy too, something that only started happening at the tail end of the long economic expansion that preceded the pandemic.

The second development came a month later, in September 2020, when the central bank’s rate-setting Federal Open Market Committee announced that it expected to hold the funds rate near zero “until labor market conditions have reached levels consistent with the committee’s assessments of maximum employment.”(SD-Agencies)