“The time has come for policy to adjust,” Jerome Powell said Friday, during a hotly-anticipated keynote address in Jackson Hole.

The Fed chair broke little new ground in his speech, and indeed no surprises were expected. That said, Powell’s cadence regarding the balance of risks — which is to say his tone in conveying the Fed’s inclination to overweight downside risks to employment in the decision calculus around the dual mandate — was insistent, if not quite urgent.

The jobless rate, he remarked, is now nearly a full percentage point off the lows, and while the increase is mostly attributable to more workers, the trend’s clear. As Powell put it, “cooling in labor market conditions is unmistakable.”

He walked through a familiar hodgepodge of statistics on the way to delivering a nakedly dovish assessment. “All told, labor market conditions are now less tight” than they were in 2019, “a year when inflation ran below 2%.” The Fed, Powell went on, does “not seek or welcome further cooling in labor market conditions.”

While that latter assertion merely echoes Powell’s remarks from the July press conference, it’s worth noting that when he said it then, it was an off-the-cuff rejoinder to a question from the press gallery. Now, he’s enshrined it into a de facto policy statement. The Fed has seen enough softening in the jobs market, and intends to leverage policy in the service of preventing additional cooling on that front.

The question, colloquially, is whether it’s too damn late. Less than 48 hours after Powell first tipped the Fed’s mounting (if still mild) discomfort with the hiring slowdown and the creeping UNR, the NFP headline decelerated further and the jobless rate ticked up another two-tenths.

August payrolls is now absolutely critical. To my mind, Powell left little doubt on Friday that in the event of a sub-100,000 headline jobs print and a further rise in the unemployment rate, a 50bps rate cut will be on the table for September. That said — and I want to be clear about this — nothing in Powell’s Jackson Hole address suggested 50bps should be anyone’s base case, and indeed if the August jobs report is steady-state, the Fed will almost surely opt for 25bps.

But, again, the critical takeaway from Powell was that if the Fed hadn’t seen enough labor market softening by July 31, they had by August 2. Maybe “a few participants” (to employ the language of the meeting minutes) aren’t entirely sold yet, but a rate cut next month is guaranteed. As in: There’s no plausible scenario for August’s CPI update that’d take a 25bps cut off the table. Sure, there are some implausible scenarios that might, but… well, they’re implausible.

“The direction of travel is clear,” Powell said, of the outlook for rates. “The timing and pace of rate cuts will depend on incoming data, the evolving outlook and the balance of risks.” There again, I’d encourage readers to note that when it comes to the balance of risks, the employment side of the mandate isn’t just on equal footing with inflation, it now takes precedence, which is to say a warm CPI report on September 11 wouldn’t offset a markedly weak jobs report in the Fed’s decision calculus.

“We will do everything we can to support a strong labor market,” Powell emphasized. “The current level of our policy rate gives us ample room to respond to any risks we may face, including the risk of unwelcome further weakening in labor market conditions.”

That’s pretty much all you need to know about Powell’s speech, but you’re encouraged to read it in full here. I gotta say, it was entertaining as far as macro-policy speeches go. While regaling the world with the tale of the worst developed market inflation surge in a generation, Powell conceded that mistakes were made, but noted that the Fed wasn’t alone in underestimating the durability of price increases. “The good ship ‘Transitory’ was a crowded one,” he mused.

Ultimately, Powell said, it was “an extraordinary collision between overheated and temporarily distorted demand and constrained supply” which pushed up inflation across the US and, indeed, the world. That’s Powell’s story, and he’s sticking to it. As he put it Friday, “That is my assessment of events. Your mileage may vary.”