This Sunday’s reading from the Acts of the Apostles describes how members of the earliest Christian community joyously devoted themselves to communal life, holding their possessions in common and granting to each according to need. The economic environment in modern-day America is a good deal harsher for those in need, with stubbornly high unemployment and rising fuel and food prices. U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke didn’t offer much solace Wednesday at the first-ever press conference by someone in his position.

The labor market is “improving gradually,” Bernanke said, but the Fed is reluctant to try to do more to stimulate job creation. “It is not clear that we can get substantial improvements in payrolls without some additional inflation risk.

“In my view, if we are going to have success in creating a long-run sustainable recovery with lots of job growth, we have to keep inflation under control.” The central bank interprets rising gas prices to be a simple problem of supply and demand, Bernanke said. “There’s not much that the Federal Reserve can do . . . per se.”

A longtime advocate of greater Fed transparency, Bernanke said the idea of holding a press conference was a natural as the bank looks for ways to provide more information to the public, despite the risk of being misinterpreted. “It was our judgment after thinking about this for some time that at this point the additional benefits from more information, more transparency, [and] meeting the press directly outweighed some of these risks,” he said.

An article by Jennifer Epstein for Politico.com