If inflation isn’t “transitory,” how else should the Fed describe it?

The central banker’s job description demands a subtle sense of semantics: A stray word or misused phrase can move markets and rock economies. This holiday season, it appears, Jerome Powell, the chair of the US Federal Reserve, will spend his days musing over the meanings of the word “transitory.”

Through 2021, as the world has tried to recover from the covid-19 pandemic, Powell and other Fed officials have described rising prices as part of a pattern of transitory inflation. But on Nov. 30, Powell said he wants to retire the word. It wasn’t doing its job, he explained while testifying to the Senate Banking Committee. “It’s probably a good time to retire that word and explain more clearly what we mean.”

The debate surrounding inflation this year has hinged on “transitory” and its interpretations; those outside the wonky world of economics seem to infer an altogether different meaning to Powell’s. The tension shows just how difficult it is to communicate what’s happening to prices during a pandemic that has shifted consumer demand from services to goods and jammed global supply chains. But it also shows the limits of the English language to describe the complex, abstract phenomenon of inflation.

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