Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said Tuesday that it will take "longer than expected" to achieve the confidence needed to get inflation down to the central bank’s 2% target, signaling that it will also likely take longer to cut rates.

"Given the strength of the labor market and progress on inflation so far, it's appropriate to allow restrictive policy further time to work and let the data and the evolving outlook guide us," Powell said at an event in Washington on the Canadian economy.

The comments mark Powell’s first acknowledgement yet that sticky inflation data in the first quarter of this year are not showing the progress that the Fed needs to begin easing monetary policy.