It’s more or less official: the Federal Reserve is engineering a recession.

After first telling the public he could safely bring down inflation without hurting the economy, then telling us there might be some suffering after all, but just a little bit, Fed chair Jerome Powell is now openly acknowledging an economic downturn is on the menu. After he and other Fed officials vowed they’d keep tightening monetary policy until the job was done, come what may, Powell has in two separate sets of public remarks over the past few weeks explicitly said fixing inflation will “require a sustained period of below-trend growth” and “some softening of labor market conditions,” as the Fed’s third consecutive seventy-five-point hike sent markets scrambling.

For those confused, Powell’s remarks were Fed-speak for: a bunch of Americans are going to have to lose their jobs, and a bunch more are going to have a harder time finding one. New Federal Reserve Bank of Boston president Susan Collins recently put it in slightly more comprehensible terms as she gave her sign-off to Powell’s strategy: fixing inflation will “require slower employment growth and a somewhat higher unemployment rate.”