For the first week of the month, it looked like the we were entering the time-honored “dog days of August”, that foreboding mindset people get when they feel stuck in the mud and sense that things just weren’t going right.
In the spring of 2022, the Federal Reserve embarked on a mission to wrestle inflation under control without cratering the economy. At the time, the Fed’s preferred inflation measure, the core Personal Consumption Deflator, was increasing at a 5.5 percent rate and the unemployment rate stood at 3.6 percent.
It’s a long way to Christmas, but with a nod to that beloved holiday ballad, it’s beginning to look a lot like a soft landing. Bing Crosby is no longer with us, but Federal Reserve Chair, Jerome Powell, may soon be singing the praises for the way the economy is performing.
For economists and policy makers, waiting for inflation to subside is like waiting for Godot. But that time may finally have arrived, as the consumer price index rose less than expected in April.
Has the Fed thrown in the towel? That’s the question investors are grappling with; and those who think they know the answer are being deceived.
With a presidential election looming, geopolitical tensions escalating and a central bank considering a major shift in its policy stance, 2024 looks to be an eventful year with a wide range of possible outcomes.
January tends to be an ornery month for economists, and the calendar did not disappoint this year. In the closing months of 2023, it appeared that a Goldilocks economy was unfolding, one that featured a cooling, but still solid, pace of economic activity amid a steady decline in inflation.
No Quit in This Economy. 2023 ended on a high note, punctuated by sharp rallies in both the stock and bond markets, tangible evidence that the economy is on a steady disinflationary growth path, and strong indications that the Fed is poised to cut rates in 2024.
The era of low rates ended in March 2022 when the Federal Reserve belatedly started the most aggressive rate-hiking campaign in a generation, lifting its policy rate 11 times from near zero to a range of 5.25-5.50 percent in July of 2023, where it has remained. Until a few weeks ago, the central bank has wavered over what to do next, raise again or keep them “higher for longer”.
Higher Speed Limit Slows Inflation
The holiday shopping season has officially kicked off , and while some have predicted a less festive Santa might have been coming down the chimney, the nation’s collective stockings will not be filled with coal.
The American public may not be feeling better about things, but economists clearly are. Most households think the economy is going in the wrong direction, and consumer confi dence in one prominent survey is currently at recession levels.
As expected, the Federal Reserve held rates steady at the September 19-20 policy meeting, following 11 hikes over the last 18 months that lifted short-term rates from near zero to a range of 5.25-5.50 percent.
