Good morning. The takeaway from Federal Reserve chair Jay Powell’s two congressional testimonies this week was a definitive shrug. Powell the hawk warned that “ongoing progress toward our 2 per cent inflation objective is not assured”. Powell the dove said we’re “not far” from a good enough inflation record to cut rates “so that we don’t drive the economy into recession”. Markets ignored it, and so will we. Email us: robert.armstrong@ft.com and ethan.wu@ft.com.

Friday interview: Cliff Asness

Three decades ago, Cliff Asness was a PhD student under Eugene Fama, often considered the originator of the efficient markets hypothesis. Long before quantitative investing was a multibillion-dollar investing complex, Asness wrote his dissertation on what would today be called “equity factors” — the measurable attributes of stocks that account for their returns. Think of value (cheap stocks beat expensive) or quality (strong companies beat weak ones) or size (small beats large). Today, factor investing — and quant investing more broadly — is big business, with lessons for the non-quants among us.

In the interview below, Asness talks quant investing, private equity, pod shops and why he thinks artificial intelligence is less than revolutionary for finance.