WASHINGTON — TheFederal Reserve chairman, Ben S. Bernanke , said Tuesday that the Fedwas seeking greater clarity about the health of the recovery, suggestingthat officials were not ready to approveanother round of stimulus.
Mr. Bernanke repeated the Fed’s June assessment that economic growth has slowed, and is likely to remain slow. And he renewed his warning that scheduled tax increases and spending cuts wouldtip the economy back into recession .
Rather than committing to new steps, Mr. Bernanke told the Senate Banking Committee that the decision would turn on the judgment of Fed officials about the pace of job growth in the coming months.
The major issue, he said, is “whether or not there is in fact a sustained recovery going on in the labormarket, or are we stuck in the mud?” Mr. Bernanke added a wrinkle, saying thecentral bank “would certainly want to react against any increase in deflation risk.”
With the unemployment rate stalled above 8 percent and some measures of inflation expectations falling, some analysts read Mr. Bernanke’s remarks as indicating action was likely in the coming months. The next meeting of the central bank’s top policy committee is late in July.
Major stock market indexes fell immediately after Mr. Bernanke’s prepared remarks were made public but gradually rose ashe took questions and seemed more open to additional stimulus.
But Mr. Bernanke’s cautious language underscored the Fed’s reluctance to ride again to the aid of a plodding economy. The central bank has intervened repeatedly to prevent backsliding into recession, and Mr. Bernanke repeated his standard promise to maintain that vigilance. But the Fed has not acted with similar urgency to reduce the persistently high rate of unemployment.
Mr. Bernanke also noted the Fed could take other steps, such as indicating that short-term interest rates would remain near zero beyond the end of 2014.
“We are looking for ways to address the weakness in the economy, should more actually be needed,” he told the committee.
Mr. Bernanke appears before the House and Senate twice each year to discuss his management of the nation’s monetary policy. But the senators showed relatively little interest in that subject, focusing their questions instead on revelations that banks had manipulated Libor , abenchmark interest rate that figures in determining the value of a wide range of financial assets.
“I just wanted to touch briefly on monetary policy before moving on to the Libor scandal,” Senator Patrick J. Toomey, Republican of Pennsylvania, said, in an amusinglyfrank acknowledgment of the hearing’s focus.
In response to questions from members of both parties, Mr. Bernanke said that the Fed had responded properly when it learned of problems with Libor by notifying British regulators, and by offering suggestions for improvements. He said he still lacked “full confidence” in the integrity and accuracy of the indexbecause those suggestions had not been followed.
And he spoke favorably of nascent efforts to supplant Libor with benchmarks that arebased on an “observable market rate.”
Mr. Bernanke’s economic outlook was tinged by mentions of new signs of a slowdown.He noted new weakness in manufacturing and business spending, areas of strength earlier this year. He also said that “fiscal strains associated with the crisis in Europe have increased since earlier in the year.”
Inflation has also weakened. The government’s index of consumer prices was unchanged in June and rose 1.7 percent over the previous 12 months, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said Tuesday. A narrower measure that offers a clearer view of trends, because it excludes volatile food and energy prices, rose 0.2 percent in June and 2.2 percent over 12 months.
And the so-called fiscal cliff is looming.
He again urged Congress to adopt a plan that would limitany short-term changes in fiscal policy, while agreeing on long-term steps to reduce the “unsustainable” growth of the federal debt.
“The most effective way that Congress could help to support the economy right now,”he said in his prepared testimony ,“would be to work to address the nation’s fiscal challenges in a way that takes into account both the need for long-run sustainability and the fragility of the recovery.”
These problems were sufficient for the Fed to announce a modest expansion in its efforts to stimulate growth after its policy making committee met in June. It said that it would continue to buy long-term Treasury securities until year’send.
Republicans pressed Mr. Bernanke to forswear additional action, warning that new measures would eventually lead to higher inflation and suggesting that the Fed’s policies were allowing Congress todelay a reckoning with the federal debt. Mr. Bernanke rejected both arguments. Of standing still to put pressure on Congress, he said dryly, “I don’t think that’s my responsibility.”
In a shift from earlier hearings, some Democrats put countervailing pressure on Mr. Bernanke to agree that he should do more. “I’m afraid theFed is the only game in town,” said Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York. “And I would urge you to take whatever actions you think would be appropriate.”
But Mr. Bernanke said only that he took seriously the Fed’s dual mandate to maximize employment and control inflation.
He will testify Wednesday before the House Financial Services Committee.

The combination of higher taxes and cuts in federal spending set for the end of the year “would probably knock the economy back into a recessionand cost a lot of jobs,” Mr. Bernanke said.