As far as achieving our dual mandate, this is a onesided battle. We currently do not face a tradeoff between our employment objective and our inflation objective, so monetary policy can and must be used aggressively to bring down inflation. Let me turn to the troubling persistence of inflation.
In the past couple of inflation reports, housing services has been a major contributor to measured inflation. In the latest inflation reports, shelter prices rose 0.7 percent on a monthly basis. Housing has a large weight in price indexes, as households spend a sizable amount of their incomes on housing services.