Tag Archives: Fed Chair Jerome Powell

Central bank mulling over when to do something it hasn’t done since the darkest days of the pandemic: cut interest rates

CNN News screenshot

Important Takeaways:

  • For the past year, the Fed has kept interest rates at their highest level in more than two decades, making it more expensive to get a mortgage, borrow money and pay off debt.
  • “A rate cut could be on the table in the September meeting,” Fed Chair Jerome Powell said on Wednesday, immediately jolting markets.
  • But some of that luster faded later in his press conference as he repeatedly told reporters that a September cut is by no means a sure shot.
  • And if you’re thinking the Fed surely won’t begin cutting in November because of the election, you might want to reconsider.
  • The Fed, Powell said, will act in the best interest of the American economy regardless of the timing. “We don’t change anything in our approach to address other factors like the political calendar,” he said.

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Debt ceiling impasse? Fed’s ‘loathsome’ game plan for the ‘unthinkable’

By Ann Saphir

(Reuters) – Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen says failure to raise the U.S. debt limit could lead to the unthinkable: a default on government payment obligations. That’s an outcome the White House on Friday warned could plunge the economy into recession.

If the impasse in Congress over the $28.5 trillion debt limit isn’t resolved before an October deadline, what would the Federal Reserve – the backstop for U.S. financial markets as the lender of last resort – be prepared to do?

As it turns out, Fed Chair Jerome Powell may already have something of a game plan. The country faced a similar crisis over the debt limit in 2011 and again two years later, and at an unscheduled October 2013 meeting, Fed policymakers – including Powell, who was then a Fed governor, and Yellen, who was the Fed’s vice chair – debated possible actions in response.

The plan included a process for managing government payments, given the Fed’s expectation that Treasury would prioritize principal and interest but would make day-by-day decisions on whether to cover other obligations.

Changes to the Fed’s supervision of banks were also planned. Banks would be allowed to count defaulted Treasuries toward risk-capital requirements, and supervisors would work directly with any bank experiencing a “temporary drop in its regulatory capital ratio.” The U.S. central bank would also direct lenders to give leeway to stressed borrowers.

Policymakers also mapped out an approach to managing market strains and financial stability risks stemming from a technical default.

They readily agreed to some measures, including expanding ongoing bond purchases to include defaulted Treasuries, lending against defaulted securities and through the Fed’s emergency lending window, and conducting repurchase operations to stabilize short-term financial markets.

Other actions sketched out in briefing notes and during the meeting were more controversial, including providing direct support to money markets by buying defaulted Treasury bills, or simultaneously selling Treasuries that are not in default and buying ones that are.

Powell described these approaches as “loathsome.”

“The economics of it are right, but you’d be stepping into this difficult political world and looking like you are making the problem go away,” he said at the time.

Powell added, however, that he wouldn’t rule it out in a catastrophic situation, a point also made by several of his colleagues, including Yellen and John Williams, who at the time was San Francisco Fed president and is now head of the New York Fed.

(Reporting by Ann Saphir; Editing by Paul Simao)

Fed officials say important they be ‘well positioned’ to act, minutes show

By Howard Schneider, Jonnelle Marte and Lindsay Dunsmuir

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Federal Reserve officials last month felt that substantial further progress on the economic recovery “was generally seen as not having yet been met,” but agreed they needed to be poised to act if inflation or other risks materialized, according to the minutes of the U.S. central bank’s June policy meeting.

In minutes that reflected a divided Fed wrestling with the onset of inflation and financial stability concerns, “various participants” at the June 15-16 meeting felt conditions for reducing the central bank’s asset purchases would be “met somewhat earlier than they had anticipated.”

Others saw a less clear signal from incoming data and cautioned that reopening the economy after a pandemic left an unusual level of uncertainty and required a “patient” approach to any policy change, stated the minutes, which were released on Wednesday.

Still “a substantial majority” of officials saw inflation risks “tilted to the upside,” and the Fed as a whole felt it needed to be prepared to act if those risks materialize.

“Participants generally judged that, as a matter of prudent planning, it was important to be well positioned to reduce the pace of asset purchases, if appropriate, in response to unexpected economic developments, including faster-than anticipated progress toward the Committee’s goals or the emergence of risks that could impede the attainment of the Committee’s goals,” the minutes stated.

The Federal Open Market Committee at its meeting last month shifted towards a post-pandemic view of the world, dropping a longstanding reference to the coronavirus as a constraint on the economy and, in the words of Fed Chair Jerome Powell, “talking about talking about” when to shift monetary policy as well.

The start of that discussion, along with interest-rate projections showing higher borrowing costs as soon as 2023, caused investors to anticipate the Fed will move faster than expected to end its support for an economy still afflicted by high levels of unemployment and, now, rising inflation.

Long-term Treasury yields are near five-month lows, and the gap between those and shorter-term yields has been narrowing, a development often associated with skepticism about the outlook for longer-term economic growth.

In this case, Cornerstone Macro analyst Roberto Perli wrote recently, “the market views the perceived Fed shift as harmful to the long-term prospects for the U.S. economy,” with the Fed’s stated commitment to getting back to full employment seen as weakening in the face of higher-than-anticipated inflation.

Powell, speaking to reporters after the end of last month’s policy meeting, said any increase in the Fed’s benchmark overnight interest rate from the current near-zero level remained far off. He said, however, that the Fed would begin a “meeting-by-meeting” assessment of when to start reducing its $120 billion in monthly purchases of Treasury bonds and mortgage-backed securities, and of how to announce its plans for doing so.

The U.S. economy, he said at that point, was still “a ways away” from the progress on job creation the Fed wants to see before reducing its asset-purchase program, which supports the recovery by making the purchase of homes, cars and similar items more affordable by holding down borrowing costs for households and companies.

But “we’re making progress,” Powell said in the briefing, and to such an extent that he and his colleagues now needed to “clarify … thinking around the process of deciding whether and how to adjust the pace and composition of asset purchases.”

TAPERING TIMELINE

What investors are wondering is how fast the discussion will spool out and when the actual “taper” may begin.

Several regional Fed policymakers have since said they felt the economy was near the point where the central bank should pull back. However, even some of them have indicated it will take several meetings to develop and announce a plan for reducing the bond purchases.

The Fed’s policy-setting committee meets eight times a year, with the next two meetings scheduled for July 27-28 and Sept. 21-22. In the interim, the central bank will hold its annual research conference in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, a setting that Fed chiefs have often used to signal policy changes.

The U.S. economy added 850,000 jobs in June. If that pace of hiring continues over the summer, it “could prompt the Committee to accelerate the tapering timeline” from an expected start in January to as soon as October, analysts from Nomura wrote last week.

Economists polled by Reuters expect the Fed to announce a strategy for tapering its asset purchases in August or September, with the first cut to its bond-buying program beginning early next year.

(Reporting by Howard Schneider; Editing by Dan Burns and Paul Simao)

Exclusive: Fed Chair Powell says won’t allow ‘substantial’ overshoot of inflation target – April 8 letter to U.S. senator

By Ann Saphir

(Reuters) – The U.S. economy is going to temporarily see “a little higher” inflation this year as the economy strengthens and supply constraints push up prices in some sectors, but the Federal Reserve is committed to keeping any overshoot within limits, Fed Chair Jerome Powell said in an April 8 letter.

“We do not seek inflation that substantially exceeds 2 percent, nor do we seek inflation above 2 percent for a prolonged period,” Powell told Senator Rick Scott in a five-page letter responding to a March 24 letter from the Florida Republican raising concerns about rising inflation and the Fed’s bond buying program. “I would emphasize, though, that we are fully committed to both legs of our dual mandate – maximum employment and stable prices.”

Scott, while not on the Senate Banking Committee that directly oversees the Fed, nonetheless has been a vocal critic of Powell. He has warned that the Fed’s low interest rates and bond-buying program will force prices higher, hurting families and businesses.

His office provided Powell’s letter to Reuters, and suggested the response did not allay the senator’s concerns.

“The data is clear that inflation is rising, and Chair Powell continues to ignore this growing problem,” Scott’s office told Reuters in the email. “Senator Scott remains concerned about the impact inflation will have on low and fixed-income American families, like his growing up. He is calling on Chair Powell to wake up to this threat, lay out a clear plan to address rising inflation and protect American families.”

Powell in his letter said that low inflation constrains the Fed’s ability to offset economic shocks with easy policy, and that after a decade of too-low inflation, the Fed is now aiming for inflation moderately above 2%.

“We understand well the lessons of the high inflation experience in the 1960s and 1970s, and the burdens that experience created for all Americans,” Powell said in the letter. “We do not anticipate inflation pressures of that type, but we have the tools to address such pressures if they do arise.”

(Reporting by Ann Saphir; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Dan Burns)

One year into pandemic, sky begins to clear over U.S. economy

By Ann Saphir and Howard Schneider

SAN FRANCISCO/WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Despite the U.S. economy’s near miss with a depression last year and an ongoing coronavirus pandemic that has brought travel to a virtual halt, Jeff Hurst, the chief executive of vacation rental firm VRBO, sees a boom on the horizon.

“Every house is going to be taken this summer,” Hurst said, as the expected protection from vaccines arrives in step with warmer weather, unleashing a cooped-up population with record savings stashed away. “There’s so much built-up demand for it.”

That sort of bullish sentiment has increasingly taken root among executives, analysts and consumers who see the past year of comparative hibernation – from the government-ordered business closings last spring to continued risk avoidance by the public – giving way to a cautious re-emergence and green shoots in the economy.

Data from AirDNA, a short-term rental analytics firm, showed vacation bookings for the end of March, which traditionally coincides with college spring breaks, are just 2% below their pre-pandemic level. Employment openings on job site Indeed are 4% above a pre-pandemic baseline. Data on retail foot traffic, air travel and seated diners at restaurants have all edged up.

And economists’ forecasts have risen en masse, with firms like Oxford Economics seeing a “juiced-up” economy hitting 7% growth this year, more typical of a developing country.

In a symbolic milestone, Major League Baseball teams took to the field on Sunday, as scheduled, for the first games of the spring training season. Crowds were required to observe social distancing rules and limited to around 20% of capacity, but MLB has a full schedule penciled in following a truncated 2020 season that did not begin until July and saw teams playing in empty stadiums.

DEPRESSION DODGED

As of Feb. 25, about 46 million people in the United States had received at least their first dose of a COVID-19 vaccine – still less than 15% of the population and not enough to dampen the spread of a virus that has killed more than half a million people in the country, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The emergence of coronavirus variants poses risks, and a return to normal life before immunity is widespread could give the virus a fresh foothold.

Nor is optimism global. The European short-term rental market, for example, is suffering, with tens of thousands of Airbnb offerings pulled. Up to one-fifth of the supply has disappeared in cities like Lisbon and Berlin, as owners and managers adjust to a choppy vaccine rollout and doubts about the resumption of cross-border travel.

In the United States, the vaccine rollout and a sharp decline in new cases has produced an economic outlook unthinkable a year ago when the Federal Reserve opened its emergency playbook in a terse promise of action and Congress approved the first of several rescue efforts.

The fear then was years of stunted output similar to the Great Depression of the 1930s, while some projections foresaw millions of deaths and an extended national quarantine. Instead, the first vaccines were distributed before the end of 2020, and a record fiscal and monetary intervention led to a rise in personal incomes, something unheard of in a recession.

“We are not living the downside case we were so concerned about the first half of the year,” Fed Chair Jerome Powell told lawmakers on Wednesday. “We have a prospect of getting back to a much better place in the second half of this year.”

‘ROCK ON’

U.S. gross domestic product, the broadest measure of economic output, may top its pre-pandemic level this summer, approaching the “V-shaped” rebound that seemed unrealistic a few weeks ago.

That would still mean more than a year of lost growth, but nevertheless represents a recovery twice as fast as the rebound from the 2007-2009 recession.

Jobs have not followed as fast. The economy remains about 10 million positions short of where it was in February 2020, and that hole remains a pressing problem for policymakers alongside getting schools and public services fully reopened.

It took six years after the last recession to reach the prior employment peak, a glacial process officials desperately want to shorten.

While recent months have seen little progress, the outlook may be improving. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said in mid-February the country had a fighting chance to reach full employment next year.

It may take more than vaccines, however. Officials are debating how fully and permanently to rewrite the rules of crisis response – and specifically how much and what elements of the Biden administration’s proposed $1.9 trillion rescue plan to approve.

Fiscal leaders last year cast aside many old totems, including fear of public debt and a preoccupation with “moral hazard” – the bad incentives that generous public benefits or corporate bailouts can create. For Republicans, that meant approving initial unemployment insurance benefits that often exceeded a laid-off worker’s salary; for Democrats, it meant aiding airlines and temporarily relaxing banking regulations.

It worked, and so well that an odd consortium of doubters has emerged to question how much more is necessary: Republicans arguing help should be aimed only at those in need, and some Democrats worrying that so much more government spending in an economy primed to accelerate may spark inflation or problems in financial markets.

If the outlook is improving, however, it’s in anticipation that government support will continue at levels adequate to finish the job.

“Rock on,” Bank of America analysts wrote in a Feb. 22 note boosting their full-year GDP growth forecast to 6.5%, an outcome premised on approval of $1.7 trillion in additional government relief, “unambiguously positive” health news, and stronger consumer data. Given all that, “we expect the economy to accelerate further in the spring and really come to life in the summer.”

And the view back at VRBO? In most prime vacation spots, Hurst said, “You won’t be able to find a home.”

(Reporting by Howard Schneider; Editing by Dan Burns and Paul Simao)

Powell’s Econ 101: Jobs not inflation. And forget about the money supply

By Howard Schneider

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – In a congressional hearing dominated by talk of the pandemic and what may be needed to heal the economy from its effects, Fed Chair Jerome Powell on Tuesday had a subtle message for U.S. senators evaluating their options.

Toss out the college textbooks, because the world has changed.

The unemployment rate? Forget it. The Fed only cares about the number of people working and how to get it higher, not an age-old statistic that, for all its familiarity, overlooks a key group, namely those who stopped looking for work during the pandemic and need to be brought back.

Inflation? Not a problem anytime soon. Queried by Democratic U.S. Senator Mark Warner about the need to make “a sizeable investment” in U.S. infrastructure, Powell set aside classic concerns of hefty government borrowing driving up prices and responded “this is not a problem for this time as near as I can figure.”

The money supply? No longer relevant, Powell, 68, told Republican U.S. Senator John Kennedy, 69, about the once-important measures of cash and easily spent assets that was a central focus for the Fed in the past.

“When you and I studied economics a million years ago M2 and monetary aggregates seemed to have a relationship to economic growth,” Powell said, referring to one main measure of the money in public hands. “Right now … M2 … does not really have important implications. It is something we have to unlearn I guess.”

There has been a lot of unlearning these days at the Fed and the economic academy, on everything from basic economic relationships to the hazards – or not – of mountainous government debt. Even before the pandemic the central bank was reassessing one of its core ideas – that when the unemployment rate was low, inflation would be high, and vice versa.

The idea led past central bankers to worry whenever the jobless rate fell below a certain point, and to start itching for rate increases that would slow the economy and fend off the coming inflation. It also put people out of work.

That concept was pretty much thrown overboard as of August: Whatever drives inflation, the Fed concluded – and there is plenty of disagreement about what that is – a low unemployment rate is no longer considered part of it.

The unemployment rate itself may even have become passé. It measures the number of people working divided by the number of people working or looking for work. What it does not count, though, are the people out of the labor market – retirees, for example, but also, and of more concern, women who abandoned careers to care for family during the pandemic.

When the Fed considers its goal of maximum employment these days, Powell said, “we don’t just mean the unemployment rate, we mean the employment rate,” measured against the population as a whole and aspiring to “high levels of participation.”

(Reporting by Howard Schneider in Washington; Editing by Dan Burns and Matthew Lewis)

Fed’s Powell says support for economy needed for ‘some time’

By Howard Schneider

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. economic recovery remains “uneven and far from complete” and it will be “some time” before the Federal Reserve considers changing policies it adopted to help the country back to full employment, Fed Chair Jerome Powell said on Tuesday.

The U.S. central bank’s interest rate cuts and purchases of $120 billion in monthly government bonds “have materially eased financial conditions and are providing substantial support to the economy,” Powell said in remarks prepared for delivery to a Senate Banking Committee hearing on the state of the economy.

“The economy is a long way from our employment and inflation goals, and it is likely to take some time for substantial further progress to be achieved,” the hurdle the Fed has set for discussing when it might be appropriate to pare back support.

While the health crisis in the country is improving and “ongoing vaccinations offer hope for a return to more normal conditions later this year,” Powell said, “the path of the economy continues to depend significantly on the course of the virus and the measures taken to control its spread.”

Powell’s appearance in Congress comes at a significant juncture for the U.S. economy, which is still reeling from the pandemic but perhaps poised to take off later this year if the vaccination program hits its stride.

The hearing before the Senate Banking Committee, one of the Fed chief’s mandated twice-a-year appearances on Capitol Hill, is Powell’s first since Democrats won the White House and control of both chambers of Congress.

After his opening remarks, Powell will field questions from senators who are likely to focus on the tension between a pandemic that has claimed more than half a million U.S. lives and left millions unemployed, and an economy flush with savings and central bank support, and about to get a fresh gusher of federal spending.

INFLATION DEBATE

The growing likelihood that Congress will pass President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion stimulus plan has raised concerns about a possible spike in inflation and overheating in asset markets, but Powell’s message to lawmakers will likely be a familiar one: don’t let off the gas.

Even with Americans being vaccinated at a rate of more than 1.5 million a day and coronavirus caseloads dropping, Powell and his fellow Fed policymakers are focused instead on the nearly 10 million jobs missing from the economy compared to a year ago, and the potent risks still posed by the virus.

They’ve pledged to keep interest rates low and use other monetary policy tools to speed up a labor market recovery. Two weeks ago, Powell pushed for a “society-wide commitment” to that goal – a nudge to lawmakers debating Biden’s stimulus plan.

The scale of the proposed stimulus, coming on the heels of about $4 trillion in federal aid and heavy bond purchases by the Fed last year, has flustered the feathers of inflation hawks and stoked criticism that the U.S. central bank has boosted prices of stocks and other assets to unsustainable levels.

Fed officials are united on that front. They don’t think inflation is a risk, and regard much of the recent rise in stock prices, for example, as a sign of markets’ confidence in a post-pandemic economic rebound, not an artificial run-up fueled by cheap money.

The hearing on Tuesday, which will be followed by Powell’s appearance before the House of Representatives Financial Services Committee on Wednesday, may also provide a gauge of his prospects of remaining Fed chief when his current four-year term expires early next year.

Biden will have to decide in coming months whether to reappoint Powell, who was chosen for the job by former President Donald Trump. The nomination is subject to Senate ratification.

(Reporting by Howard Schneider; Editing by Paul Simao)