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Jay Powell has sought to push back on speculation that the Federal Reserve had won its fight against inflation, indicating it was too soon to rule out further interest rate rises or to start discussing cuts.
“It would be premature to conclude with confidence that we have achieved a sufficiently restrictive stance, or to speculate on when policy might ease,” the chair of the US central bank said on Friday, just before the start of a quiet period preceding its final monetary policy meeting of the year.
In roughly two weeks’ time, the Federal Open Market Committee is preparing to again keep its benchmark policy rate steady at a 22-year high of 5.25 to 5.5 per cent, a level it has maintained since July. The Fed began a historic drive to raise interest rates in March 2022 in an effort to stamp out surging inflation.
But even as the Fed continues to pause its rate-rising campaign, the high degree of uncertainty about the US inflation outlook and concerns about easing conditions in financial markets left officials wary. They have refrained from signalling more definitively that it has reached a peak in interest rates and discussing criteria for lowering borrowing costs.
Powell on Friday affirmed this message, warning at an event at Spelman College in Georgia that the US central bank was “prepared to tighten policy further if it becomes appropriate to do so”, even as he made clear that the policy was “well into restrictive territory” and that the full effects of the Fed’s past actions have yet to materialise.
Taking questions at the event, he stressed that the Fed would be closely monitoring economic data. “Let the data reveal the appropriate path,” he said.
Also on Friday, Austan Goolsbee, president of the Chicago Fed and a voting member on the FOMC this year, said that so far there was “no evidence” that inflation was going to stall at 3 per cent, and instead forecast that it will fall back to the Fed’s longstanding 2 per cent target.
As of October, the core personal consumption expenditures price index — the Fed’s preferred inflation gauge — registered an annual pace of 3.5 per cent.
After Powell’s remarks, yields on policy-sensitive two-year Treasury notes remained lower on the day, about 4.62 per cent, suggesting investors are largely brushing off the Fed chair’s warnings. Traders in federal funds futures markets boosted bets that the Fed could begin reducing rates as early as March 2024, putting the odds at about 70 per cent on Friday. That is up from about 20 per cent a week ago.
For cuts to be considered, the Fed needs to see several inflation reports that corroborate this trend — something Powell emphasised on Friday.
“While the lower inflation readings of the past few months are welcome, that progress must continue if we are to reach our 2 per cent objective,” he said.
Additional reporting by Kate Duguid in New York
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