Which I think makes the argument that the Fed might not be the right entity to fight this. Powell literally says in this speech that the Fed needs to weaken labor market conditions (4th paragraph) to strengthen labor market conditions (3rd paragraph). But if the goal is strong labor market conditions and he already notes "the labor market is particularly strong", what are we all doing here? Congress should probably be the one tasked with addressing supply side issues instead of the Fed because the demand side issues aren't actually a problem that needs solving.

I think the Fed would agree with you. Powell and Yellen before him have indicated that they think fiscal policy is a much better means of addressing some of the issues they’ve tried to deal with via monetary policy, but the Fed can actually act while congress generally refuses to do so (IRA aside).

> Congress should probably be the one tasked with addressing supply side issues

Because the deficient supply of self licking ice cream cones?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-licking_ice_cream_cone

"Strong labor market" is only part of the Fed's charter. The full mandate is:

> so as to promote effectively the goals of maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long-term interest rates

But those goals are redundant because they all effectively mean keep inflation in check. According to Powell's own argument in the 3rd paragraph in this speech, keeping inflation in check is a goal because "without price stability, we will not achieve a sustained period of strong labor market conditions that benefit all."

I'm not going to argue that these things are completely orthogonal, but as the current inflation crisis illustrates, we can have steep inflation and high labor participation (of course, sustaining that labor participation in the midst of steep inflation is infeasible, but most people aren't economically literate and even professional economists get it wrong with troubling frequency).

Something people don't appear to understand is that the fed only controls the brake pedal and maximum speed limit. They can't force more money into the economy as so many people seem to believe.

So half the time, the Fed is just some sort of con man, trying to trick the economy into doing what they want through press releases and optimistic predictions, etc.

The other time they are just slowing the economy down for good or bad reasons.

It doesn't look like supply issues will sort themselves out though.

Many of the current shortages (industrial plant failures, food shortages) are due to climate issues. Putin isn't helping, but even without the Russia sanctions, we'd still be facing all sorts of shortages (PVC, microchips, olive/sunflower oil, wheat, mustard, water shortages blocking the Panama Canal, etc, etc).

The root cause of all that is climate change, which is worsening linearly with time, which means the backlogged impact on the economy is increasing quadratically.

Exactly. And I don't think people, in general, have wrapped their heads around what is truly unfolding right in front of us in terms of availability of cheap, accessible high density energy and the increasing impacts of the climate crisis. Energy is the economy and the economy is energy. I like the term, "energy blind" which I've heard Nate Hagens use [1]

[1] https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/