(The Epoch Times)—Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell will be under the spotlight when he delivers his final keynote address at this week’s annual central bank retreat beginning on Aug. 21.
More than 100 people, including central bankers, academics, and financial industry leaders, will converge on Jackson Hole, Wyoming, for the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City’s 43rd Economic Policy Symposium from Aug. 21 to Aug. 23.
This year’s event is titled, “Labor Markets in Transition: Demographics, Productivity, and Macroeconomic Policy.”
It will be Powell’s final Jackson Hole appearance before his term expires in May 2026. He is delivering the keynote address on Aug. 22, and has historically used the main event to convey pivotal moments for monetary policy.
In 2022, for example, Powell drew inspiration from one of his predecessors, Paul Volcker, to underscore the central bank’s resolve to combat inflation.
A year later, the Fed chief outlined the institution’s cautious approach to monetary policy: While inflation is cooling, the job is not finished.
Weeks before the 2024 presidential election, Powell struck an optimistic tone that rallied Wall Street. However, he did not lay out the super-sized half-point interest rate cut that transpired a month later.
“The time has come for policy to adjust,” he said during a speech on Aug. 23, 2024. “The direction of travel is clear, and the timing and pace of rate cuts will depend on incoming data, the evolving outlook, and the balance of risks.”
Economic conditions in August 2025 differ slightly from those of a year ago.
On the one hand, recent data suggest that the U.S. labor market may be starting to deteriorate. In addition to a weaker-than-expected 73,000 new jobs in July, the Bureau of Labor Statistics recorded downward revisions of 258,000 for May and June—the largest two-month negative adjustment since 1979.
On the other hand, new government statistics indicate that tariffs may be affecting the U.S. marketplace. While the headline annual inflation rate in the July Consumer Price Index came in below economists’ expectations, the Producer Price Index and import prices surged in July.
With these latest developments, Powell’s monthslong wait-and-see approach could prove to be warranted or a policy misstep heading into his highly anticipated speech.
Brian Leonard, portfolio manager at Keeley Gabelli Funds, said Powell’s prepared remarks will emulate his commentary over the past several months.
“At Jackson Hole, I think Powell will stick to the rhetoric he’s been using. The tariffs should have some indirect impacts, so a cautious approach is warranted,” Leonard said in a note emailed to The Epoch Times.
Because employment conditions have been in better balance and growth prospects remain intact, Powell and his colleagues have stated over the past several months that the Fed can continue to wait before taking policy action.
Whether the recent numbers will trigger a dovish pivot depends on what the next batch of numbers—non-farm payrolls and inflation for August—suggest about the U.S. economy, according to Chicago Fed President Austan Goolsbee.
“We’re going to have to see where we are. I still think underneath all of this, we’ve been in a strong position on the economy going into April, and there is still a lot of strength in the economy,” Goolsbee told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” in an Aug. 15 interview.
For monetary policymakers, it is a balancing act.
Cutting interest rates could risk resuscitating inflationary forces, but leaving them higher for longer could bolster risks to the labor market and the broader economic landscape.
Wall Street is confident that the policymaking Federal Open Market Committee will lower interest rates next month for the first time since December 2024, penciling in a shift in focus to the employment aspect of the dual mandate.
According to the CME FedWatch Tool, there is an 83 percent chance of a quarter-point reduction.
“Powell could pave the road for a 25 basis-point cut in September, or he could push back on those expectations, or he could simply not discuss policy much at all,” said Tom Essaye, president and co-founder of the Sevens Report Research, in a note emailed to The Epoch Times.
The prepared remarks also will have implications for the financial markets, Essaye said. Pointing to a rate cut would provide investors with optimism, but pushing back against rate-cut expectations would likely trigger a pullback on the New York Stock Exchange.
Until then, traders will have another key Fed-related event before Powell’s speech.
Pitstop for a Few Minutes
On Aug. 20, the Federal Reserve will release the minutes from the July Federal Open Market Committee meeting.
The meeting summary will continue to highlight policymakers’ assessments of economic conditions and their concerns regarding inflation and the labor market.
In July, the Fed kept the benchmark federal funds rate—an influential policy rate that affects business, consumer, and government borrowing costs—unchanged for the fifth consecutive meeting, keeping it within a range of 4.25 percent to 4.5 percent.
The meeting was consequential for two reasons.
First, the Fed witnessed the first double dissent in about 30 years. Christopher Waller, a Fed governor, and Michelle Bowman, Fed vice chair for supervision, supported lowering interest rates. They have since defended their votes, alluding to a deteriorating labor outlook.
In an Aug. 1 statement, Bowman stated that employment conditions have “become less dynamic,” with “increasing signs of fragility.”
“The employment-to-population ratio has dropped significantly this year, businesses are reducing hiring but continue to retain their existing workers, and job gains have been centered in an unusually narrow set of industries that are less affected by the business cycle, including health care and social services,” Bowman said.
“Had these revised numbers been posted in real time, the Fed would have lowered interest rates, perhaps by 50 basis points,” Jeremy Siegel, senior economist at WisdomTree, said in an Aug. 4 commentary.
“Policy is too tight for the real data. Hopefully, a Jackson Hole Powell pivot is on the horizon.”
The 12-person Federal Open Market Committee will hold its next meeting on Sept. 16 and Sept. 17.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
