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Powell spoke at a volatile time, with stock markets and bond yields both declining in the wake of President Donald Trump's whipsaw announcements of steep import tariffs on major trading partners Mexico and Canada, followed by delays in implementing them. Trump has also doubled tariffs on imports from China.

America is feeling uneasy about the Trump administration’s rapid-fire trade policy changes, but Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said Friday he’s not worried.

The Federal Reserve is likely to keep its key interest rate unchanged in the coming months as it waits for widespread “uncertainty” stemming from President Donald Trump's policies to resolve, Chair Jerome Powell said Friday at a conference in New York. Powell said the Trump administration is making policy changes in several areas, including trade, taxes, government spending, immigration and regulation, and added that the “net effect” of those changes are what will matter for the economy and the Fed's interest rate policies. “While there have been recent developments in some of these areas, especially trade policy, uncertainty around the changes and their likely effects remains high,” Powell said.

As President Trump and his chainsaw, Elon Musk, dismantle the federal government, economists are starting to worry that one casualty could be the lifeblood of their profession: data.

U.S. Federal Reserve Governor Adriana Kugler said on Friday that rising inflation risks argue for an extended period of steady central bank interest rate policy. “Given the recent increase in inflation expectations and the key inflation categories that have not shown progress toward our 2% target, it could be appropriate to continue holding the policy rate at its current level for some time,” Kugler said in the text of a speech prepared for delivery before the Conference on Monetary Policy Transmission and the Labor Market held in Lisbon by the Banco de Portugal.

Bessent said employment should come from private companies, not the federal government.

U.S. job growth picked up in February, the Labor Department reported on Friday, with employers adding 151,000 jobs. Waller and other Fed officials have said a strong labor market for now allows the central bank to keep its benchmark overnight interest rate in the 4.25%-4.50% range as it waits for more progress on inflation, which remains above the 2% goal. But the latest jobs report also showed the unemployment rate ticked up to 4.1% and the number of people settling for part-time work because they couldn't find a full-time position also rose sharply, pushing up a broader measure of unemployment known as the U-6 to 8%, the highest level for this measure of underemployment since October 2021.