The Federal Reserve’s shift to a more “inclusive” employment policy in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement may have kept it from curbing inflation, several top economists suggested.
Central bankers had long been wary of both high jobless rates and particularly low ones – raising rates when unemployment was unusually low to curb the risk of inflation.
But in 2020, after George Floyd’s death, the Fed employed a sharp policy pivot to focus on a “broad-based and inclusive” employment goal, effectively ending those precautionary measures around low unemployment.
“It was no longer good enough to hit employment targets in the aggregate. Rather, targets had to be hit on an ‘inclusive’ basis that included all groups,” Kenin Spivak, chief executive and chairman at SMI Group, told The Post.
“The Fed failed to raise interest rates when it should have done so, leading to the sustained inflation experienced during the Biden administration, and from which we are still slowly recovering,” he added.
Economists have been sounding the alarms that the Fed’s “inclusive” employment strategy may be to blame for inflation that hit a four-decade high under Biden as the central bank prepares for its first strategy review since 2020, according to a Bloomberg report.
Since 2012, the Fed’s rate-setting panel has each year approved a strategic document on its long-term goals.
Policymakers conducted their first review of the document in August 2020 – when unemployment jumped above 10% and inflation was well below the Fed’s 2% goal — as protests grew over George Floyd’s murder at the hands of Minneapolis cops.
That’s when the “broad-based and inclusive” employment goal was set, and the Fed said it would only act to correct employment “shortfalls,” or high unemployment.
The central bank’s “aggressive interpretation” of maximum employment stopped it from raising rates in 2021 when inflation started to pick up, according to a paper written UC Berkeley economists Christina Romer – chair of Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers – and her husband, David Romer.
“The narrative record suggests that the reinterpretation of the maximum employment goal played a crucial role in slowing the Federal Reserve’s response to rising inflation,” they wrote in the paper, which was published in September by a Washington think tank.
In another paper published last year, Michael Kiley, deputy director of the Fed’s financial stability division, said the policy change had likely backfired.
The switch to focusing solely on employment shortfalls “exacerbates economic volatility, worsens employment shortfalls and creates excess inflationary pressures” compared to the Fed’s old strategy, he wrote.
In 2022, the inflation rate peaked at 9.1%, the highest since 1981. In 2023, when inflation hit 4.1%, the unemployment rate fell to its lowest level in more than five decades.
Inflation has remained above the Fed’s 2% target rate, coming in at 3% in January, Biden’s final month in office, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistic’s Consumer Price Index.
“The shift over placing an over-importance on maximizing unemployment at the cost of minimizing inflation is detrimentally hurting Americans, especially because after-tax wages just simply haven’t kept up with the cost of inflation,” Ted Jenkin, co-founder of oXYGen Financial, told The Post.
“In the end, even if you are employed, if your wages can’t match the pace of the cost of living you have a real problem, so the scales need to shift in Fed Policymaking toward minimizing inflation.”
Fed Chair Jerome Powell has staunchly defended the strategy change, having infamously called the soaring inflation rate “transitory.”
After the Fed’s January meeting, he defended the 2020 strategy, arguing that it’s illogical to raise rates before there is evidence of inflation.
“Why would you preemptively want to put people out of work in the absence of any evidence that suggested that this was not a sustainable level?” Powell said.
Joseph Camberato, chief executive of National Business Capital, also supported the Fed’s focus on maximum employment.
“This economy has been tricky to navigate, with a lot of different factors pushing prices up. The Fed had to thread a very tight needle,” Camberato told The Post. “We avoided a recession, and inflation didn’t spiral out of control.”
Ken Mahoney, chief executive at Mahoney Asset Management, said today’s balance – “a very large majority of the country having a job and dealing with higher inflation” – seems fairly attractive compared to other scenarios, like much higher unemployment with less inflation.
However, he acknowledged that inflation since 2020 has been “a mess.”
