By now you know that everyone at the Fed who votes on monetary policy thinks interest rates are going down at least 0.5 percentage point in the coming year and some anticipate double that level of easing. But Jay Powell said two more things that should guide every investor’s strategic outlook.

First, Powell “welcomes the progress” on inflation. That’s an absolutely crucial attitude if you’re committed to being invested across your life.

He isn’t banking on inflation continuing to drop at any particular rate or to any particular level across any particular timeline. But he isn’t asking a lot of questions about the trailing numbers either hoping to somehow reveal a hidden problem.

All the most powerful person in the global economy is doing is accepting the good data alongside the bad. Life is like that. There will be good numbers and bad ones.

You can’t explain the bad beats away. Reality is reality. However, that also means you can’t close yourself off to the good beats when they hit.

As human beings, most of us fear the pain and try to avoid it. Go too far in that direction and you end up closing yourself off to the progress . . . to the opportunities life also provides.

When you’re closed off to the opportunities, you’re not an investor. At best, you’re watching somebody else’s experience and refusing to participate because you have a feeling it’s all a horror movie in the long run.

If that’s your world, I can’t really help you. Protect what you have as well as you can because you’re probably not open to the possibility of taking a calculated risk that pays off to put you ahead of where you are right now.

That’s not my world. I’m invested. And it’s not Powell’s world either. When he sees progress, he doesn’t nitpick it into oblivion by interrogating how long it lasts or even if it’s real.

He accepts it. Embraces it. “Welcomes” it when it comes.

On Wall Street, we make money when it’s flowing. I’ve watched Jay Powell for years and he believes in calculated risk, which is another way of saying he’s motivated by a form of game theory.

When making a move gives him a reasonable opportunity to change the game board in his favor, he’ll make the move. Otherwise, he’s content to conserve his resources for a better opening.

Of course that move needs to make a real impact. It has to be meaningful. We’re lucky on Wall Street because our moves all have money attached and money is a number. If the move doesn’t move the money more than you’d get in the bond market, it isn’t worth making.

But then there’s that second insight Powell made in the press conference. “There’s little basis for thinking the economy is in a recession now.”

Every word there matters. He’s not blindly optimistic. He knows that you’re rarely more than 3 years away from the next recession and almost never more than 5 years from that cyclical moment of truth.

As he told the reporter, there’s always a chance that a recession is mere months from materializing. They can even come from thin air like the one in 2020 when the economy locked down hard and fast.

However, you can’t plan for thin air scenarios like a global pandemic. Investors and other human beings need to extrapolate from current conditions to shape our expectations about the future.

Does the world look good or bad right now? Is it getting better or worse? At what rate?

A recession is nothing but a deterioration in economic conditions big enough to affect a broad segment of the population and lasting at least 5-6 months. That’s it. It doesn’t mean mass layoffs, bank crashes, bear markets, a bent yield curve or profound suffering.

And the logical correlate of that is that mass layoffs, bank crashes, the yield curve, the market and profound suffering do not necessarily line up with every recession. They often come together but the causal relationship is more complicated.

Bear markets and the yield curve tend to precede a recession. The Fed has a lot of power over the yield curve and markets fear the Fed.

But right now, nobody in the Fed expects GDP to decline in the coming year. Growth will slow to somewhere above 1 percent and below 2 percent, but that’s far from the end of the world. We’ve muddled through with less in the past. It doesn’t mean active economic destruction . . . wealth destruction.

At worst, the people who vote at the Fed think unemployment will edge up to 4.2% next year. Again, not the apocalypse. Closer to “normal” historically.

Powell used the word “normalizing” a lot in that press conference. Going back to “normal” only feels awful when you’re addicted to abnormal if not completely unsustainable conditions.

And as far as he can see, there’s “little basis” for thinking things are all that terrible right now. He’s approaching this as an economist and Wall Street insider, not as a private person.

This economy can feel miserable. I get it. It’s been a long and exhausting couple of years. We’re all working harder just to keep up with inflation.

But the numbers don’t support that misery. When that happens, economists and Wall Street insiders acknowledge their feeling but go with the numbers. We trade on numbers. Our feelings are our own.

That final word was “now.” He doesn’t see much basis for thinking the economy is in a recession right “now,” here in the present where I’m writing this and you’re reading it.

This is the time that matters. The past is dead. We can’t trade it or go back in any way to change it.

The future is nebulous. I can’t predict it. All I can do is extrapolate on the conditions I see in the present. If they continue, the future will look like the present. If they change, the future will change in that direction.

Powell and his cronies at the Fed don’t see the present as that bad. Wall Street agrees. The Dow and the NASDAQ are hitting record highs. This is the best those indices have done in all of history.

Is this as good as it gets? The Fed thinks things get at least a little better next year. In that scenario, we’ve already lived through the worst.

I for one welcome the progress. I hope you do as well.