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Chairman of the Fed, Powell, made public comments today at an event. Not too much new, but he acknowledged that the hot employment report supports the Fed's prior inclination to continue raising interest rates this year.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/07/business/econom...

"
Mr. Powell...called a recent slowdown in price increases 'the very early stages of disinflation.' He added that the process of getting back to normal is 'not going to be, we don't think, smooth' and is 'probably going to bumpy.'...

Mr. Powell said that the Fed did not expect the jobs report to be so strong, and that the ongoing robustness reinforced why the process of lowering inflation will 'takes a significant period of time.'

While he said that it is good that the disinflation so far has not come at the expense of the labor market, he also [said]...

'We anticipate that ongoing rate increases will be appropriate,' Mr. Powell said. He said that in the wake of the jobs report, financial conditions are 'more well aligned' with that view than they had been previously.
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Alan Bindner *(Economist at Princeton) has a response:

Some­what? In truth, the first and sec­ond halves of 2022 were like two dif­fer­ent worlds in terms of in­fla­tion. The most stun­ning ex­am­ple is the be­hav­ior of the over­all con­sumer price in­dex. While this mea­sure of in­fla­tion isn't the Fed's fa­vorite (more on that shortly), it gets vastly more pub­lic at­ten­tion than any other mea­sure. The CPI rose at an 11.1% an­nual rate in the first half of 2022 and a 1.9% an­nual rate in the sec­ond half. No, that is not a typo'a tad un­der 2%.

One pos­si­ble rea­son may be that the Fed's 2% in­fla­tion tar­get ap­plies not to the CPI but to the de­fla­tor for per­sonal con­sump­tion ex­pen­di-tures'a wonk­ish point, but it's true. How­ever, PCE in­fla­tion also crum-bled'from 8% in the first half of 2022 to 2.1% in the sec­ond. That's 'only' a 6-point drop, less than the 9-point drop in CPI in­fla-tion, but still re­mark­able. The FOMC calls that 'eas­ing some­what?'
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-fed-now-has-a-goo...

Another reason could well-be the Fed's typical focus on the Labor Market and in this case how robust the Labor Market is in spite of interest rate hikes over the past year.

Note: 'The underlying strength of the services sector of the economy is still very robust, and that's where I think a lot of us are focusing our attention,' Neel Kashkari, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis

The Federal Reserve is well-aware that core price inflation currently is driven by corporate profits and not wages, however they can't concede their long-enshrined belief that low unemployment drives wages and thus inflation. In the current inflationary cycle, corporate profits has drive price inflation and not wages. While corporate profits have surged in the last four quarters wages have only risen 5%, not even keeping up with inflation.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/dec...

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