The next meeting of the Fed’s Open Market Committee that must decide on interest rates will be held between March 21 and 22.
The President of the United States Federal Reserve (Fed), Jerome Powellclarified this Wednesday that the body has not yet made a decision on how much to raise interest rates and that he is waiting to know various economic data.
“We have some potentially important data to analyze (…) Once again, we have not made any decisions about the March meeting and We’re not going to do it until we see the additional data.”he noted in a hearing before a committee of the United States House of Representatives.
The next meeting of the Fed’s Open Market Committee that must decide on interest rates will be held between March 21 and 22.
Powell thus qualified the words he pronounced before the Senate on Tuesday, in the first of the two appearances that, by mandate, he has to offer to the Chambers every six months to inform them of the monetary policies carried out by the regulator.
In his opening address to the Senate, Powell said that “if the totality of the data indicates that faster tightening is warranted, we would be prepared to accelerate the pace of rate hikes”some words that were interpreted as a warning of the acceleration of rates and that made the markets wobble, with falls in the main indices.
Today he repeated the same speech but, when he got to that part, he introduced a sentence: “And I emphasize that we still do not have the data”a clarification that he insisted on during Question Time.
In order to reduce inflation, the Fed has carried out a series of rate hikes, eight since a year ago. The last one occurred on February 1 and was less than the previous ones, 0.25 points.
With this rise, the rates stood in a range of 4.5% and 4.75%, the highest figure since September 2007.
Since it reached its peak in June (9.1%) of 2022, inflation in the United States has eased to 6.4% in January, when it fell for the seventh consecutive month, although only one tenth, a rate of decline that It’s too slow, according to the Fed.