Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell vowed in an interview aired Sunday that the central bank will proceed carefully with interest rate cuts this year and likely will move at a considerably slower pace than the market expects. In a wide-ranging interview with “60 Minutes” after last week’s Federal Open Market Committee meeting, Powell expressed confidence in the economy, promised he wouldn’t be swayed by this year’s presidential election, and said the pain he feared from rate hikes never really materialized.
“With the economy strong like that, we feel like we can approach the question of when to begin to reduce interest rates carefully,” he told the news magazine’s Scott Pelley, according to a transcript CBS released. “We want to see more evidence that inflation is moving sustainably down to 2%,” Powell added. “Our confidence is rising. We just want some more confidence before we take that very important step of beginning to cut interest rates.”
As he did during a Wednesday news conference, he said it’s unlikely the FOMC will make that first move in March, which futures markets had been anticipating. The meeting concluded with the committee holding its benchmark borrowing rate in a range between 5.25%-5.5%. In its post-meeting statement, the committee said it would not be cutting “until it has gained greater confidence that inflation is moving” to the 2% target.
Markets have been making aggressive bets on how many cuts the Fed would make this year. Current pricing is pointing to five quarter-percentage points reductions, though Powell backed the FOMC’s December “dot plot” grid of individual members’ estimates that pointed to just three moves. “We’ll update [the outlook] at the March meeting. I will say, though, nothing has happened in the meantime that would lead me to think that people would dramatically change their forecasts,” he said, noting that “the time is coming” for cuts but perhaps not yet.
Source: CNBC
