Just a week after he was nominated for a second term as Federal Reserve chairman, Jerome Powell sounded unfamiliar. He said it was time to retire the word “transitory” that he and many other officials have long used to describe building inflation, signaling in testimony before the Senate Banking Committee that the Fed is likely to accelerate the tapering of its emergency bond-buying program. That suggests rate increases might come sooner than planned.
Wall Street was stunned. Major stock indexes dropped, with the S&P 500 down…
