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EDITOR IN CHIEF- ABDULLAH BIN SALIM AL SHUEILI

Fed, in apparent dovish shift, says rates near neutral

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NEW YORK: US Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell injected investors with a strong dose of optimism, saying that the central bank’s policy rate is now “just below” estimates of a level that neither brakes nor boosts a healthy US economy, comments that many investors read as signalling the Fed’s three-year tightening cycle is drawing to a close.


Stocks and interest-rate futures jumped, even while economists wrestled to interpret whether Powell intended to send a message or was simply misunderstood.


On their face, the comments were a reversal from early last month, when Powell said the key interest rate was probably still a “long way” from a so-called neutral level and that the Fed might even tighten policy beyond that level. Stocks swooned on those remarks as investors bet the US central bank would need more rate hikes to prevent the economy from overheating.


The possibly dovish shift in language on Wednesday came as President Donald Trump stepped up attacks on Powell, criticizing the Fed’s rate hikes as undercutting his economic and trade policies. Trump told the Washington Post just on Tuesday that he is “not even a little bit happy” with the Fed chief.


Powell “gave the market, and presumably President Trump, exactly what he wanted, which was an admission that the previously proposed path of future rate hikes was probably too aggressive and opening to slowing the rate of hikes,” said Oliver Pursche, vice chairman and chief market strategist at Bruderman Asset Management in New York.


The Fed has settled into a quarterly rate-hike cycle and is still expected to raise rates again next month, in what would be the fourth hike this year. But signs of a slowdown overseas and nearly two months of market volatility — including another sharp selloff last week — have clouded an otherwise mostly rosy US picture in which the economy is growing well above potential and unemployment is the lowest since the 1960s.


“We know that things often turn out to be quite different from even the most careful forecasts,” Powell said at an Economic Club of New York luncheon on Wednesday. “Our gradual pace of raising interest rates has been an exercise in balancing risks.”


Rates “are still low by historical standards, and they remain just below the broad range of estimates of the level that would be neutral for the economy,” he added.


Factually, Powell’s remarks on Wednesday and in October are both true. On Wednesday he referenced a range, and in October he likely referenced a median. The benchmark rate, now at 2.00-2.25 per cent, is within a quarter of a percentage point of the bottom of the Fed’s range for neutral, but is also several quarter-point rate hikes below the mid-point estimate of 3 per cent.


But markets, especially after the recent sell-off, were focused less on such subtleties than on what Powell may have telegraphed about the future path of rate hikes. — Reuters


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