Even though the outlook is brighter than expected, Fed officials meeting at the annual Jackson Hole conference aren’t ready to conclude that prices will continue to cool.Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, who last year warned that the battle against inflation would cause “some pain,” faces a more delicate task as he once again addresses people across the globe. That’s because his hope now is to avoid pain.

Annual inflation has already slid to about 3 percent from more than 9 percent in 2022, boosting hopes that the U.S. will avert a recession. But even though the outlook is brighter than many economists had expected, Powell and other Fed policymakers aren’t ready to conclude that prices will continue to cool, as they gathered last week at their annual conference in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.

The stakes are high. The economy has proved to be surprisingly resilient, but Fed officials are wrestling with often conflicting information to decide whether to keep raising interest rates and how long they need to keep them at high levels to ensure that the worst price spikes in four decades are fully over. A wrong calculation could trip the economy into a slump.

The question is beginning to divide the central bank’s rate-setting committee, which so far has been in lockstep on policy decisions. Some members have been voicing increasingly divergent views about whether the economy can slow without a big jump in unemployment — the so-called soft landing that has proved so elusive in the past.