Powell Says Fed Still Has a ‘Ways to Go’ After Half-Point Hike
Steve Matthews
Thu, December 15, 2022 at 4:47 AM
(Bloomberg) -- Chair Jerome Powell said the Federal Reserve is not close to ending its anti-inflation campaign of interest-rate increases as officials signaled borrowing costs will head higher than investors expect next year.
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“We still have some ways to go,” he told a press conference on Wednesday in Washington after the Federal Open Market Committee raised its benchmark rate by 50 basis points to a 4.25% to 4.5% target range. Policymakers projected rates would end next year at 5.1%, according to their median forecast, before being cut to 4.1% in 2024 — a higher level than previously indicated.作者: sec2100 時間: 2022-12-15 09:25
Powell said that the size of the rate increase delivered on Feb. 1 at the Fed’s next meeting would depend on incoming data — leaving the door open to another half-percentage point move or a step down to a quarter point — and he pushed back against bets that the Fed would reverse course next year.作者: sec2100 時間: 2022-12-15 09:27
“I wouldn’t see us considering rate cuts until the committee is confident that inflation is moving down to 2% in a sustained way,” he said. “Restoring price stability will likely require maintaining a restrictive policy stance for some time,” he said.作者: sec2100 時間: 2022-12-15 09:33
“It’s going to take a while to for the Fed to achieve what they want to achieve,” former New York Fed President William Dudley said in an interview on Bloomberg Television. “They have to slow the economy down sufficiently to generate enough slack in the labor market so wage trends come down to be consistent with 2% inflation.” Dudley is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist and senior adviser to Bloomberg Economics.
Consumer-price increases have begun a more pronounced slowdown from their 40-year high earlier this year. But a growing cadre of economists expect the Fed’s aggressive action to tip the US into recession next year.
Such concerns have drawn lawmaker criticism, with Democratic senators Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders and Sheldon Whitehouse warning that rate hikes risk “slowing the economy to a crawl.”
Officials gave a clearer sign that they expect higher rates to impact the economy. They cut their 2023 growth forecasts, seeing expansion of 0.5%, according to median projections released Wednesday. They raised their estimate for 2022 GDP slightly to 0.5%. The central bankers increased their projection for the unemployment rate next year to 4.6% from its 3.7% level in November.