Jerome Powell: “It is not really a great strategy to wait until the 8th or 9th year of an expansion to get those benefits.”

If we're going to do that successfully, we need to do it in a completely nonpolitical way, which means we don't take sides, we don't play one side against the other, we stay out of issues that are really not our bailiwick.

It is a big risk to our independence if we were to stray into areas where we shouldn’t that really aren’t part of our mandate.

Rising downside risks to employment have shifted our assessment of the balance of risks

The public would lose faith that the central bank will make decisions based only on what’s best for all Americans.