America’s inflation fever may be breaking at last

“We will stay the course until the job is done,” said Jerome Powell, the Federal Reserve’s chairman, on December 14th, shortly after the central bank’s latest interest-rate rise. As a statement of intent, his words were both straightforward and utterly sensible. But what it means for the job to be done is becoming a matter of controversy. Inflation remains uncomfortably high. Meanwhile, the aggressive monetary tightening of the past year is only now filtering through to the economy, complicating assessments of whether the Fed has in fact done enough to rein in prices.