[C]ontrary to popular opinion, Federal Reserve officials do actually eat and fill up their gas tanks. The FOMC's mandate, as I see it, is to control the inflation rate we all experience—so-called headline inflation. In other words, I interpret the Fed's price stability mandate as requiring the FOMC to manage the growth rate in the average of all prices, including food and energy.
... it's our job to control that headline inflation over the course of time. It's not feasible to exert such control day-to-day or month-to-month or even quarter-to-quarter. But monetary policy can control the rate of overall inflation over the medium term. In operational terms, I think growth in overall consumer prices around 2 percent per year through a period shorter than the proverbial "long term," say, a medium-term period of three or four years, is consistent with the Fed's price stability mandate.
While short-term measures of inflation have moved up rather strongly in the last few months, I hold to the view that this trajectory will not persist. I continue to see the Federal Reserve's inflation objective I just outlined as attainable.