The tedium of central banker soundbites on Tuesday was a bit grating. I wouldn’t call it nails on a chalkboard exactly, but it wasn’t Mozart either.

Market participants hoping for something meaningful out of Jerome Powell were disappointed. Or at least this market participant was disappointed.

Powell took part in a panel discussion with his Canadian counterpart Tiff Macklem for this week’s IMF festivities in Washington. It was a maddeningly rambling affair replete with schmaltzy anecdotes aimed at underscoring America’s soft spot for the US’s well-mannered dependent.

That was the main takeaway from Powell’s cordial colloquy with Macklem: We still love Canada. And Canadians. They’re like pet gerbils. When we get done managing the world every day, we go check on them to be sure they’re still alive. We tap on the side of their enclosure and giggle if they do something adorable, like outrun their wheel and flop over backwards.

To be fair, Powell’s remarks weren’t entirely devoid of substance. He did acknowledge the lack of progress towards the Fed’s disinflation goals, and in light of that, suggested the Fed may end up holding terminal for considerably longer than some on the Committee were inclined to expect as recently as a month ago.

Recall that Powell spent a good part of last month’s post-FOMC presser performing semantic acrobatics around the concept of “confidence.” The upshot was that CPI data covering January and February didn’t do anything to increase the Fed’s faith in the disinflation trajectory.

During that Q&A (after the March policy meeting, I mean), Powell was careful to draw a distinction (implicitly) between the Fed’s level of confidence not going up and that level diminishing. Although consecutive CPI overshoots didn’t increase the Fed’s confidence, the numbers didn’t fatally undermine it either.

Critics would say that’s a ridiculous (dangerous, even) distinction. If the goal’s price stability and the data suggests inflation’s picking back up, that data can be, and in this context should be, described as a setback and therefore detrimental to confidence. Not merely “confidence neutral,” so to speak.

During the chat with Macklem on Tuesday, Powell went a little further down the road to conceding what’s plain, even as he maintained the distinction: The last three CPI releases “have clearly not given us greater confidence and instead indicate that it is likely to take longer than expected to achieve that confidence,” he said.

Again, the effort to distinguish between data which detracts from the Fed’s confidence and data which undermines it seems belabored. At best. At worst, it seems disingenuous. This year’s first three US CPI reports, and particularly successive warm reads on Powell’s preferred “supercore” measure, were bad news. Period.

The MoM readings on core CPI (and here I mean “regular” core) won’t get the Fed down to 2%. If the goal’s 2%, those MoM readings are therefore bad. That’s self-evident. It’s almost tautological. Leave it to a Fed Chair to deny a tautology, which is effectively what Powell does when he endeavors to perpetuate the idea that setbacks aren’t setbacks, but rather “a lack of further progress,” as he put it Tuesday.

Powell went on to insist that current policy “is well positioned to handle risks.” Critics will immediately say that isn’t true, or at least not vis-à-vis the “risk” of rekindled inflation.

A quick check on the Chicago Fed’s gauge suggests financial conditions remain easier now than when the Fed started raising rates.

Some officials are coming around to the idea that Fed policy actually isn’t all that restrictive, and that as a result, it might be wishful thinking to expect additional disinflation.

Powell’s yet to concede that, and even the Committee’s more hawkish members have been careful not to aggressively broach the subject of another rate hike. But… well, let’s just say the data hasn’t borne out Powell’s characterization of current policy settings as unequivocally restrictive. At some point, that disharmony will be a problem to the extent it starts to look like reality denial.

“We can maintain the current level of restriction for as long as needed,” Powell said in Washington on Tuesday. “Given the strength of the labor market… it is appropriate to allow restrictive policy further time to work and let the data and the evolving outlook guide us,” he added.