A flurry of speeches from Fed officials on Friday made one thing crystal clear: The outlook for interest-rate policy depends on what happens next to core inflation.

“The path for rates will depend crucially on any signals of an acceleration in core inflation,” said Chicago Fed President Charles Evans, in a speech in Sweden.

While core inflation was running close to 2% late last year, it has fallen to a 1.6% year-over-year rate in March.

None of the six Fed officials who spoke publicly contradicted Fed Chairman Jerome Powell’s view that core inflation is being held down by transient forces.

Read: Sizzling jobs report justifies Powell’s Fed press conference reluctance to suggest rate cuts

The more dovish officials stressed that Powell’s view was only a forecast and they would be watching the incoming data.

“Although some of the drop [in core inflation] may be due to temporary special factors, we don’t want to be too dismissive of this development,” Evans said.

Cleveland Fed President Loretta Mester, one of the more hawkish regional Fed president, said that while core inflation was below 2%, it was “stable,” and the Fed didn’t need to ease swiftly.

“I would be concerned if inflation and expectations were falling, if aggregate demand was falling, if the signal of low inflation was that growth was going down. But there is no evidence of that. The economy is in a really strong pace. So I’m willing to be patient with inflation on the downside as well as with inflation on the upside,” Mester said in a CNBC interview.

Fed officials expressed satisfaction with the economic outlook for this year.

“The U.S. economy is in a very good place. The unemployment rate is at a 50-year low, real wages are rising in line with productivity, inflation pressures are muted, and expected inflation is stable,” said Fed Vice Chairman Richard Clarida, in a speech at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

The “news” over the last month is that the economy is looking moderately better than it did earlier this year, noted St. Louis Fed President James Bullard, in a CNBC interview.

Growth should come in around a 2.5% annual rate in 2019, he said, better than his earlier expectations for growth around 2%.

This is a far cry from the recession fears expressed by some private-sector economists.

Fed officials agreed that the strong April jobs report has not caused them to believe monetary policy should be tightened.

The government reported that 263,000 new jobs were added during the month and the unemployment rate fell to a 50-year low of 3.6%.

Read:Unemployment falls as U.S. creates 263,000 jobs

Asked on CNBC if the Fed was going to raise rates, Dallas Fed President Rob Kaplan replied a hike was “not in the cards.”