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You can add fresh tariff insights to the list of things people are waiting for this summer.

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell and his colleagues chose to keep rates right where they are for the time being.

But the months ahead, he said, will come with greater understanding of how the president’s levies will impact the US economy. The size, effect, and duration of the tariffs are still highly uncertain. But the Fed’s latest policy decision was all too familiar: The right choice is to wait.

Powell appeared to agree with the suite of Wall Street analysts we’ve heard from who believe the full effects of the tariffs are still in the works.

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But that didn’t stop central bankers from tweaking their projections to reflect slightly worse outcomes.

Fed officials now forecast inflation staying higher this year than previously estimated and economic growth sliding lower than prior predictions.

When asked to explain why Fed forecasts had changed without also leading to a change in the rate decision compared to the end of last year, Powell said, “We’ve learned that the tariffs are going to be substantially larger than forecasters generally thought.”

But Powell was quick to defend the health of the economy, highlighting the uncertainties of tariff policy while also touting the nation’s resilience.

The “US economy has defied all kinds of forecasts for it to weaken,” he said. Powell also nodded to improving business sentiment and the sense that people are “working their way through this,” adding, “It feels much more positive and constructive than it did three months ago.”

Tariffs are the big unknown, but things seem fine for now. So what’s the downside in waiting until the data shows something that isn’t historically low unemployment or inflation moving in the right direction?

The Fed is still combating pricing pressures, which may heighten as more levies work their way through the economy. But, perhaps counterintuitively, the Fed isn’t forecasting rates to rise or even stay where they are in the years ahead, despite projections that inflation will tick up.

To that bit of confounding Fed calculus, Powell played down his institution’s ability to see too far into the future.

“People write down their rate paths, and they do not have a really high conviction that this is exactly what’s going to happen over the next two years. No one feels that way about their rate path. They feel like, ‘What am I going to write down?’ I mean, what would you write down?” he said. “It’s not easy to do that with confidence.”