The writer is president of Queens’ College, Cambridge, and an adviser to Allianz and Gramercy

The keynote address at the annual economic symposium at Jackson Hole has traditionally offered the leader of the world’s most powerful central bank an opportunity to share important strategic insights relating not just to monetary policy but also broader economic and institutional issues.

This was not what Jay Powell chose to do last Friday. Instead, the Federal Reserve chair opted for a risk-averse approach. He largely focused his remarks on the immediate outlook for monetary policy and characterised the revisions to the central bank’s Monetary Policy Framework as a mere evolution rather than a structural break from the 2020 version. That update — which included “the idea of an intentional, moderate inflation overshoot” — proved particularly ill-suited for the economic developments that followed.