The US Federal Reserve is expected to reduce borrowing costs on Wednesday in what some observers call a “hardline cut”, which will come alongside updating the outlook for interest rates and economic forecasts for the first months of the incoming Trump Administration.
The planned cut of a quarter of a percentage point would reduce the US central bank’s benchmark interest rate to the range of 4.25%-4.50%, one percentage point below its level in September, when it began to relax the strict monetary policy used to counter the spike in inflation that began in 2021.
How much further and how quickly rates will fall next year remains increasingly uncertain, with inflation still lodged above the Fed’s 2% target, the economy growing faster than expected and the prospect that tariff policies President-elect Donald Trump’s fiscal and immigration policies could change the economic landscape in unpredictable ways once he takes office in January.
In its most recent set of quarterly projections in September, Fed officials anticipated cutting the benchmark rate by another full percentage point to bring it to around 3.4% by the end of 2025.
Between data showing inflation stalling above the 2% target and Trump’s victory in the Nov. 5 presidential election, investors now see the Fed perhaps cutting the benchmark rate by just half a percentage point. next year and will closely study Fed Chair Jerome Powell’s projections and comments at a post-meeting news conference to see if monetary policymakers also become more cautious about further rate cuts.
“While the Fed will continue to project additional easing through 2025, guidance on the pace of rate cuts will likely be more cautious going forward,” TD Securities economists wrote ahead of this week’s two-day meeting.
The Fed will release its updated monetary policy statement and economic projections at 1900 GMT and Powell is scheduled to begin speaking half an hour later.
The data, including Tuesday’s release of a strong retail sales report for November, have done little to alter the Fed’s depiction after its latest policy meeting of an economy growing at a “solid pace” with low unemployment. and inflation, which, although falling, “remains somewhat high.”
Between a new monetary policy statement, projections and Powell’s press conference, the result is likely to be “a hawkish cut” with a slower pace of reductions to come, wrote Diane Swonk, chief economist at KPMG. before this week’s meeting.
“The debate will be heated,” he said. “The economy remains stronger than meeting participants thought it would be when they started cutting in September, while improvements in inflation appear to have stalled. (…) The Fed will want time to pause see where we are and how monetary policy may change after the president-elect takes office.”
Trump will be inaugurated on January 20 and the Fed meets a little over a week later, on January 28-29. A total of 58 of 99 economists in a recent Reuters poll said they expected the U.S. central bank not to cut rates at that meeting, as policymakers take stock of how the economy is performing.
[Con información de Reuters y The Associated Press]
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