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PROGRAMMING NOTE: Morning Money won’t publish from Monday, Aug. 29-Monday, Sept. 5. We’ll be back on our normal schedule on Tuesday, Sept. 6.

JACKSON HOLE, Wyo. — Hello from Wyoming, where the Grand Teton mountains are really as beautiful as everyone says. The Federal Reserve’s annual conference here officially kicked off with a dinner Thursday night, which meant the day beforehand was filled with treks to enjoy nature; everywhere you looked, someone important was nearby wearing hiking gear, from San Francisco Fed President Mary Daly to Treasury Undersecretary Nellie Liang.

Conversation among attendees focused on how much of a divergence there is between “soft” data like consumer confidence and “hard” data, like formal surveys of jobs and spending.

“The soft data is really bad, and the hard data looks pretty decent,” said Megan Greene, senior fellow at Brown University. “The question is how long can the confidence data last before it drags the hard data down or the other way around.”

“I actually think the confidence data will win out this time,” she added.

Central bankers were interspersed with other guests of Jackson Lake Lodge, perhaps unsuspecting that the man sitting nearby in a baseball cap and sunglasses was in fact Chair Jay Powell. The lodge (which, like everything else in the area, is pricey;rooms start around $400 a night and go up from there) is inside the national park, about an hour away from the town of Jackson, Wyo. The whole thing is inconvenient and glorious.

Fed officials trickled in throughout Thursday; MM spotted almost all of the regional Fed presidents (Atlanta Fed President Raphael Bostic and Minneapolis Fed President Neel Kashkari ate lunch together), as well as Fed governors Lisa Cook and Philip Jefferson, both newbies to the board.

Also among the attendees: CEA’s Cecilia Rouse and Heather Boushey, former Fed Vice Chair Roger Ferguson, former Vice Chair Richard Clarida, Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey, former New York Fed President Bill Dudley, IMF’s Gita Gopinath, MacroPolicy Perspectives’ Julia Coronado, Harvard’s Jason Furman, KPMG’s Diane Swonk, and ADP’s Nela Richardson.

The weather was clear and bright during the day, although a storm Wednesday night led a couple of trees to fall on hotel cottages, including that of Bloomberg TV reporter Mike McKee (he wasn’t in the room when it fell and was unhurt). The forecast for Friday is sunny weather but darker clouds in the discussion of monetary policy, with Powell finally set to give his long-awaited speech on the direction of monetary policy.

Your host has already covered the short-term dilemma facing Powell, which has been the main focus of central bank officials’ remarks. But the Fed chief’s Jackson Hole speech is usually a bigger picture theme, so it will be notable to see to what extent Powell addresses broad questions like, where is a sustainable level of unemployment? How much farther will the Fed need to hike rates to really put the hammer to the economy? What seem to be the main drivers of inflation? Those questions will all only be clearer in hindsight (and even then, not entirely).

Still, as Apollo Global Management’s Torsten Slok noted to MM ahead of the conference, markets are going to make judgments about what the Fed is doing long term, even if the central bank refuses to touch on it. “They really only need to care about the near term,” he said. “In markets, we don’t have that luxury.”

Powell’s remarks will be preceded by the latest Personal Consumption Expenditure data, the inflation metric most closely watched by the Fed. It should broadly show a similar slowdown in price spikes that the Consumer Price Index reported for July. But it will provide a stark reminder of how far away the central bank remains from its 2 percent target (PCE was 6.8 percent in June).

IT’S FRIDAY — Wishing a very bittersweet farewell to our colleague, Aubree Weaver, who is wrapping up her stint as MM co-author extraordinaire this week to take on a new promotion as Legislative Affairs Editor, overseeing POLITICO Pro’s Legislative Compass team. We’re so grateful to have had Aubree’s help bringing readers the essential news every morning on financial policy, Wall Street and the economy. Wishing her all the best!

Send us your tips, story ideas and feedback to [email protected] and [email protected].

Monthly PCE, consumer income and spending data is out at 8:30 a.m. … Powell speaks at 10 a.m. … University of Michigan consumer sentiment and inflation expectation data released at 10 a.m.

ALL ABOUT THE VIBES — Atlanta Fed President Raphael Bostic spoke with The Wall Street Journal about the economy (“strong”), areas of weakness (housing, low-to-moderate income discretionary spending) and the pessimism that’s percolating among consumers and certain market participants. “Most people in our society, they don’t have any memories of living in a higher inflation environment, and so there really aren’t anchors of baselines for people to make — to focus on to have a sense of what a reasonable expectation of response will be over the longer run,” Bostic said.

Case in point: Even though the U.S. is not technically in a recession, consumer sentiment has soured to a point where that outcome feels inevitable to many. Conference Board data released late last week — based on a survey of 1,000 individuals collected in late July and early August (largely professionals and office workers) — found that 74 percent of respondents believe the U.S. is either already in a recession or will be in one within six months.

AP’s Christopher Rugaber: “Some of the very problems Fed officials are grappling with — high inflation, soaring rental costs and home prices and wide economic inequalities — are starkly evident near the idyllic mountain setting. … Inflation is particularly high in the town of Jackson and the surrounding Teton County, which, even before the pandemic erupted two years ago, was the wealthiest and most unequal place in the nation.”

GDP VS. GDI — AP’s Paul Wiseman: “The U.S. economy shrank at a 0.6% annual rate from April through June, the government said Thursday in an upgrade from its initial estimate. It marked a second straight quarter of economic contraction, which meets one informal sign of a recession.”

But, but, but: NYT’s Ben Casselman: “A key measure of economic output continued to grow last spring, easing fears that the United States is entering a recession, but adding to confusion about the state of the economy. Gross domestic income, adjusted for inflation, rose 0.3 percent in the second quarter, the Commerce Department said Thursday.”

THE LAW FIRM THAT CHANGED AMERICA — NYT’s David Enrich: “Over the past two decades, Jones Day has been building a different kind of legal practice, one dedicated not just to helping Republicans win elections but to helping them achieve their political aims once in office … To do that, the firm was bringing all the ruthless energy and creativity of corporate law to the political realm.”

ESG — Bloomberg’s Frances Schwartzkopff: “Investment professionals are warning that a Republican campaign seeking to wipe ESG off the financial map puts at risk the savings of ordinary Americans caught in the political crossfire. Environmental, social and governance investing is now under attack in the world’s largest economy.”

OFFICE SPACE — WSJ’s Heather Gillers: “Major U.S. and Canadian pension funds are cutting back investments in office buildings, betting that prices will likely fall as the five-day office workweek becomes a thing of the past.”

WATCHING CLOSE — AP’s Damian J. Troise: “Stocks closed higher on Wall Street, clawing back more of their recent losses, as the countdown clicks closer to zero for a highly anticipated speech about interest rates … Wall Street’s focus is on an economic summit at Jackson Hole, Wyoming, which has been the setting for market-defining announcements by the Federal Reserve in past years.”

PAYMENT FOR ORDER FLOW — Barron’s Bill Alpert: “Critics of retail brokers like Robinhood Markets condemn those companies for routing customers’ orders to market makers like Citadel Securities in exchange for payments … The suspicion is that greater payments to brokers must be offset by less favorable execution prices. But that isn’t what a new study finds … ‘There’s no relationship in our data between paid order flow and price execution,’ says Chris Schwarz, a finance professor at the University of California-Irvine, who [co-]wrote the paper.”

PLACE YOUR BETS — Bloomberg’s Lydia Beyoud: “After years of refusing to approve derivatives for betting on elections, Washington regulators are privately weighing a plan that could let people place as much as $25,000 on which political party will control the US Congress. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission may begin taking public feedback on the proposal from prediction-market operator Kalshi Inc. as soon as this month.”

COLD STORAGE — Earlier this week, Morning Money covered a Pew Research Center survey that indicated interest in cryptocurrency was stagnating. Just 16 percent of Americans reported having ever used, transacted or invested in crypto, a percentage that’s virtually unchanged from a little less than a year ago. New data from Morning Consult found that those who’ve held on are increasingly moving away from centralized exchanges and trading platforms that offer custodial services, instead placing their assets into “cold wallets” – or self-custody – that assure they’ll maintain control over their crypto.

The percentage of crypto users who reported using a cold wallet climbed from 24 percent in January to 40 percent as of July, according to the Morning Consult financial services analyst Charlotte Principato. The spike in cold wallet usage has corresponded with a market downturn that bankrupted several crypto lending services – which left unsecured depositors with little recourse for recovering their assets.

“People are taking it offline,” Principato said. “That’s the thing more people need to pay attention to.”

URGENT? — From POLITICO’s Marie French: “Gov. Kathy Hochul again declined Thursday to say whether she would sign or veto the measure to put a two-year moratorium on new fossil fuel-powered cryptocurrency mining operations, a first-in-the-nation proposal that the cryptocurrency industry is vociferously fighting.”

COINBASE: PLEASE VOTE — Coinbase on Thursday announced a voter registration and crypto policy education initiative on Thursday. The new campaign, which arrives on the heels of the company’s petition to the SEC for new rules that would allow them to list securities, will support the its “mission of increasing economic freedom in the world,” Chief Policy Officer Faryar Shirzad wrote in a blog post. “We are eager to do our part by providing trusted resources for crypto voters on the issues, candidates, and political process that will define crypto’s future.”

Anna Canfield Roth has been named acting assistant secretary of Treasury for management, POLITICO’s Daniel Lippman has also learned. She most recently was senior adviser and acting chief compliance and finance officer in the Office of Recovery Programs and worked in the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Office of Management and Budget in the Obama administration. Trevor Norris is returning to his role as the deputy assistant secretary for human resources and chief human capital officer.

Wall Street giant Citigroup Inc will close its consumer and commercial banking businesses in Russia starting this quarter and expects to incur about $170 million in charges over the next 18 months as a result, the company said on Thursday. — Reuters’s Lananh Nguyen