Federal Reserve Vice Chair Philip N. Jefferson took a seat at the Bank of Japan on May 28 to discuss the forces reshaping the global economy. The venue: the Bank of Japan Institute for Monetary and Economic Studies’ 2026 conference, themed “Monetary Policy from New Perspectives.” The topics: energy prices, artificial intelligence, trade disruptions, and the stubborn question of where US inflation is headed.
What Jefferson put on the table
The discussion at the IMES conference covered five interconnected threads: global energy prices, advancements in AI, trade disruptions, risks to US growth and inflation, and where the Federal Reserve currently stands on monetary policy.
None of these are new obsessions for Jefferson. He delivered a speech on AI’s economic impacts in November 2025, tackled supply-side inflation dynamics in February 2026, and addressed energy price effects on the economy in March 2026. The Tokyo appearance represents a consolidation of those individual threads into a single, coherent narrative about global uncertainty.
The conference also featured European Central Bank executive board member Philip R. Lane, underscoring that this wasn’t a casual academic exercise.
