The Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City said its annual economic symposium in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, will take place on Aug. 27 virtually and not in person as planned, the clearest sign yet of the impact of the COVID-19 Delta variant on the Fed’s plans.
“While we are disappointed that health conditions will prevent us from being able to gather in person at the Jackson Lake Lodge this year as we had planned, the safety of our guests and the Teton County community is our priority,” said Kansas City Fed President Esther George in a statement, citing the recently elevated COVID-19 health risk level in Teton County.
Under the county’s guidelines, people should not gather with non-family members or host in-person social activities.
The reversal raises questions about the Fed’s broader assessment of the Delta variant’s economic impact, which Chair Jerome Powell and other policymakers have mostly played down, saying that businesses and households have learned to live with the virus.
“It certainly is going to be a communications challenge” for Powell to stick to the view of only minor impact from the recent surge when he’ll be giving his highly anticipated speech on the economic outlook to an online-only audience,” said Yale School of Management’s Steven Kelly.
Or, as Grant Thornton Chief Economist Diane Swonk quipped on Twitter, “I think the tenor of @federalreserve Powell’s comments just shifted a bit on the economic outlook.”
At their meeting last week, Fed policymakers began coalescing around a plan to begin to reduce their support for the economy before the end of the year, as long as the labor market continued to improve as expected.