Washington ? With short-term interest rates near rock bottom, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said he still has plenty of “monetary ammunition” to prevent a destabilizing drop in prices. The Fed’s goal: pump up demand for cars, homes and other items and get the economy moving again.

At Greenspan’s appearance Wednesday before the congressional Joint Economic Committee, he gave his first detailed comments about deflation since Fed policy-makers warned May 6 they would be on guard against the remote possibility of such a rare and dangerous episode of widespread price declines.

The Fed’s main tool to influence the economy is the federal funds rate, the interest that banks charge on overnight loans.

It is at a 41-year low of 1.25 percent, which limits the number of rate cuts the Fed can order to energize the economy.

Greenspan said the Fed has other ways to pump more money into the economy, such as buying longer-term Treasury securities to drive down longer-term interest rates.

“We see no credible possibility that we will at any point, irrespective of what is required of us, run out of monetary ammunition to address problems of deflation or anything similar to that which disrupts our economy,” he said.

Greenspan stressed that the Fed did not see the chance of deflation as an “imminent, dangerous threat to the United States, but a threat that, even though minor, is sufficiently large that it does require very close scrutiny and maybe, maybe, action on the part of the central bank.”

America’s last serious case of deflation came during the Great Depression of the 1930s, and modern-day central bankers in the United States generally have focused on fighting inflation.

“The notion that deflation would have emerged just never entered our minds until the Japanese demonstrated to us otherwise,” Greenspan said. Since the early 1990s, Japan has been suffering with a stagnant economy and is now struggling to emerge from a period of deflation.

Deflation concerns raised by Greenspan and his colleagues have boosted the odds that Fed policy-makers will reduce the funds rate, perhaps by a quarter percentage point, at their next meeting on June 24-25, some economists said.

Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan testifies before the Joint Economic Committee on Capitol Hill. Greenspan on Wednesday assured the Congressional Joint Economic Committee that even with the federal funds rate at a 41-year low of 1.25 percent, the central bank has other resources to influence interest rates to jump-start economic growth.