U.S. central bankers have unambiguously telegraphed this week's policy decision: a quarter-of-a-percentage-point increase in their benchmark interest rate, the smallest since they kicked off their tightening cycle 10 months ago with one the same size.
The Federal Reserve has included that phrase in every policy statement since March 2022, when officials had just started raising borrowing costs from near zero and wanted to signal there was a lot more tightening ahead.
At the same time, he said, "there's going to be some caution" about doing anything that could feed market expectations that a pause in rate hikes is imminent. That could ease the financial conditions the Fed has fought hard to make more stringent and potentially kindle more inflation, he said, undermining its efforts to tame it.
The Fed's aggressive response also appears to have registered with U.S. consumers, who as recently as last summer had begun to view higher inflation as a more lasting phenomenon, a worrying development that had been among the catalysts for the rapid ramp-up to those outsized rate hikes. Data on Friday from the University of Michigan showed consumers'
In late 2005, for instance, after more than a year of steady interest-rate increases, policymakers wanted to "honorably discharge" some words from long service in their post-meeting statement, transcripts show, including flagging the likelihood of "measured" rate hikes to remove "accommodation."
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