The fashion world has the annual Met Gala. The movies have the Oscars. Central Banking has the annual gathering in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.

From Marketplace, I'm Novosafo in for David Brancaccio. That gathering in Jackson Hole is on now, and Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell is scheduled to make his final appearance as chair delivering a speech

in front of economists and central bankers from around the world. As always, we'll be listening

for hints on the direction of interest rates, especially amid a White House pressure campaign

to lower them. But there's another issue looming over Powell's speech, the Fed's framework for

setting policies to keep inflation in check

and the job market healthy. Marketplaces Nancy Marshall-Genzor has more on that framework

and how it might change. Every five years, the Fed makes a plan, just like Stalinist countries

used to do. Theirs were focused on every detail of the economy. The Fed, it's just trying to figure out how to

accomplish its dual mandate of stable prices and maximum employment. Ellen Mead is a former

Fed economist now at Duke. She says when Fed officials issued the first framework in 2012,

they kept talking about it as a constitution. For the first time, central bank officials set 2% as their inflation target.

They didn't establish a specific number for unemployment.

But a few years later, inflation was stuck below 2%.

So Mead says in 2020, Fed officials made a big edit.

We're going to say that when we've been really underrunning 2%,

we're going to try to make up for it by running inflation a bit above 2% for a while so that we

average out at 2. But as anyone who's been to a grocery store lately knows, inflation is now

stuck stubbornly above 2%. That 2020 framework established when low inflation was a problem,

it's outdated. Fed Chair Powell is expected to unveil a new framework in his speech today.

Former Fed economist Claudia Somm is now with new century advisors. The big edits we see are going

to, in all likelihood, be undoing the big edits we saw in 2020.

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