By Howard Schneider
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -U.S. Federal Reserve officials this week are set to accelerate the debate over whether to cut interest rates again in just over five weeks with at least a dozen policymakers speaking, including Chair Jerome Powell and new Governor Stephen Miran continuing a heavy public schedule just days into his new role.
If the Fed chatter is thick it comes as monetary policy is in flux, with a relatively slim schedule of fresh data for officials to evaluate between now and an October 28-29 meeting where they will have to decide if risks to the job market warrant another quarter-point rate cut as broadly expected by investors.
The Fed on Wednesday lowered its benchmark rate to the 4.00%-to-4.25% range, the first such move since Trump was inaugurated in January and touched off a series of policy actions, including the imposition of dramatically higher tariffs, that pushed the Fed to the sidelines waiting to see the economic impact.
Miran said on Friday he would offer a detailed rationale for his rate view at an appearance on Monday in New York. Powell speaks in Rhode Island on Tuesday.
The Fed remains under pressure from Trump to lower rates, with Miran sworn in moments ahead of last week’s meeting and in the unusual position of joining the ostensibly independent central bank while on leave as chair of Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers, and Trump asking the Supreme Court to allow his attempted firing of Fed Governor Lisa Cook to proceed.
Among a narrowly divided group of officials, the coming decision could define whether the Fed has embarked on a steady round of cuts, or is buying time to gather information.
Officials will have a relatively thin set of new information in hand to consider, including just a single month of new data on employment and inflation, covering September. The components of third-quarter gross domestic product will be available, but the initial estimate of growth and output will not be issued until after the next meeting.
JOB RISKS SEEN RISING WITH CLOSE EYE ON SEPTEMBER REPORT
The sense of risks has been changing, a fact seen in both the decision to cut interest rates last week and in indexes published as part of new Fed projections.
Those showed concern about the twin ills of rising inflation and rising unemployment, reflective of “stagflation,” peaked in March. Since then the risk of higher-than-expected inflation has eased, while the risk of higher-than-expected unemployment has increased.
September employment data will be released on October 3. While the unemployment rate remains low at 4.3%, job gains have slowed. What Powell calls a “curious” balance in the labor market has been maintained by stagnation in the number of people looking for work, an effect of the Trump administration’s tightened immigration policies.
To see ahead of the curve, policymakers have started looking at indicators like the unemployment rate among minorities, the length of the workweek, and the struggles of younger workers and college graduates to find jobs.
“For me the more likely risk is a rapid further weakening of the labor market,” Minneapolis Fed President Neel Kashkari wrote in an essay on Friday explaining why he supported the quarter-point cut and accelerated his expected pace of additional reductions.
“We know from past economic cycles that when labor markets weaken, they can weaken quickly,” he wrote.
TARIFF INFLATION MAY PASS BUT RISKS REMAIN
Additional inflation data will also be comparatively sparse, with the Consumer Price Index for September due on October 15 and the Producer Price Index the next day. The Fed uses a different inflation measure, the Personal Consumption Expenditures price index, to set its 2% inflation target, and that won’t be released until after the meeting. But CPI and PPI feed into that, allowing estimates of the September figure in time for the Fed’s October meeting.
The expectation among policymakers is clear: Inflation is expected to increase through the rest of the year and end 2025 one percentage point above target.
The median projection for year-end PCE inflation, excluding volatile food and energy prices, was 3.1%, higher than the current 2.9% for July, a figure that has risen for the past three months.
Under other circumstances those numbers might trigger warnings about rate hikes. But policymakers have gradually come to the view higher inflation right now is at least partly due to the Trump administration’s tariffs being passed along to consumers in a process that will eventually run its course.
Reminiscent of the conclusion that pandemic-era inflation was “transitory,” officials feel more grounded in their logic this time that exporters, importers, manufacturers, and consumers will share the new import taxes, adjust to the new array of costs and prices, and move on.
“A reasonable base case is that the effects on inflation will be relatively short-lived – a one-time shift in the price level,” Powell said at his post-meeting press conference last week, noting estimates that tariffs are currently adding around 0.3 to 0.4 percentage point to the current core PCE inflation reading of 2.9%.
“Tariffs are…mostly being paid by the companies that sit between the exporter and the consumer,” Powell said. “To the consumer the pass through has been pretty small. It has been slower and later, slower and smaller, than we thought.”
Comfort in the idea that inflation won’t surge, or inflationary psychology begin to take hold, is one reason Fed officials were both willing to cut rates last week and pencil in a steadier drop in borrowing costs to a lower endpoint – confidence that coming data will need to bolster, or at least not undermine, for rates to fall again.
(Reporting by Howard Schneider; Editing by Andrea Ricci)
Comments