It's a dual mandate. If I'm not mistaken, we recently reached pre-pandemic employment levels. There is no way we would have reached this point without low interest rates through the pandemic.
Other countries have the same inflation rate that we do, but with lower employment rates. Ours is a better position to be in.
(this is not to excuse the greed of the bankers - this crisis is the purest essence of capitalism, it's inherent contradictions on full and gory display.)
The Fed can’t end the invasion of Ukraine or cure avian flu or speed up cargo ships. They can raise rates and that’s about it.
No, the economists at the Fed do not think that. Or rather, they try to find out what is driving inflation in any given situation, like they did with this 2022 study:
> Inflation has remained at levels well above the Federal Reserve’s inflation goal of 2% for over a year. Separating the underlying data from the personal consumption expenditures price index into supply- versus demand-driven categories reveals that supply factors explain about half of the run-up in current inflation levels. Demand factors are responsible for about one-third, with the remainder resulting from ambiguous factors. While supply disruptions are widely expected to ease this year, this outcome is highly uncertain.
* https://www.frbsf.org/economic-research/publications/economi...