Fed won’t crash economy with interest-rate hikes: Powell

(Reuters) – The Federal Reserve has been “pretty aggressive” already with its interest rate hikes and won’t try to crash the economy with further sharp increases just to get inflation under control faster, Fed Chair Jerome Powell said on Wednesday

“We might get rid of inflation, but at a very high human cost,” Powell said at the Brookings Institution in Washington, in response to a question from a JP Morgan economist about if he would take a “shock and awe” approach to rate hikes. “I think we are in a position where the right thing to do is to move really quickly as we have, and now slow down and get to that place where we think we need to be, and by the way, there’s high uncertainty around that.”

(Reporting by Ann Saphir, Lindsay Dunsmuir and Howard Schneider; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama)