Oct 19 (Reuters) - Federal Reserve Governor Christopher Waller said on Tuesday that while inflation could stay high for longer than anticipated, the job market continues to improve, making a 1970s-style period of stagflation unlikely. The U.S. unemployment rate has fallen from a pandemic peak of 14.8% to 4.8%, a “mind-boggling” drop over just 16 months, Waller said in a virtual event held by the Stanford Institute of Economic Policy Research. Stagflation is when high inflation is coupled with a weak labor market, and that’s not the situation toward which the United States is moving, he said. (Reporting by Ann Saphir; editing by Jonathan Oatis) Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.