Two days of testimony and Q&A of Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell in front of Congress should be a reminder that trying to control monetary policy involves much more than asking when interest rates will come down.

The Fed's position is a complicated one. It has dual mandates to "enable price stability and maximum sustainable employment," as the Chicago Fed says. Price stability means keeping inflation at a 2% rate, not above or below, based on the Price Index for Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE). Maximum sustainable employment is something that changes over time and "may not be measurable directly" because many nonmonetary factors affect jobs.

For example, in his formal testimony, Powell discussed the labor market and that "a broad set of indicators suggests that conditions have returned to about where they stood on the eve of the pandemic: strong, but not overheated." The ratio of open jobs to workers is roughly 1.26, slightly above where it was in 2019. Nominal wage growth is down. Inflation has calmed. The result as Powell said, is that "the risks to achieving our employment and inflation goals are coming into better balance."