After an all-out fight against inflation over the past two years, the Federal Reserve recently voted to lower interest rates by a half percentage point. The Sept. 18 move by the central bank was bolder than many investors expected.
The Fed’s first rate cut since the world collapsed in March 2020 amid the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak drew elation in equities markets. Investors welcomed the supersize rate cut as evidence that the aberration of the last two years of restrictive monetary policy is over.
But reading between the lines, Fed Chairman Jerome Powell and his peers are not imposing some emergency effort to save markets from themselves. In fact, in the yearslong standoff between the Fed and an investor class addicted to the easy money of the 2008-2022 era, the Fed has quietly won its war. It’s done so mostly by ignoring the demands of both Wall Street and Washington, D.C., to forge forward on almost exactly this path a little less than one year ago.
At its final meeting of 2023, the Fed predicted that it would cut rates three times for a total of 75 basis points, but investors telegraphed more than twice as many cuts beginning in the first quarter of 2024. In reality, the Fed has hewed narrowly to what it said it would do all along. Although the central bank will score the inflation reduction headlines it so desperately wants, it’s once again quietly urging caution.
September’s Summary of Economic Projections shows that still nearly half of the Fed’s voting members believe it will only cut rates once more this year, bringing the total 2024 cuts to 75 basis points, exactly what it predicted late last year. Though a narrow majority says it will cut twice more, the SEP predicts a median interest rate of 3.4% by the end of 2025, close to the 3.6% of the final 2023 SEP projected for the end of 2025.
The Fed has also remained precise and constant in its prediction that long-run interest rates will even out at 2.9%, far from the zero-bound once assumed as the default neutral interest rate. Powell reiterated as much during his postmeeting press conference, agreeing that “the neutral rate is probably significantly higher than it was back” during the Zero Interest-Rate Policy era.
Most importantly, the Fed isn’t done. Even beyond Powell’s usual caveats that the Fed remains data-dependent and committed to inflation falling below its 2% target in the long run, the central bank also promised to continue to undo its balance sheet, “reducing its holdings of Treasury securities and agency debt and agency mortgage-backed securities.”
In other words, quantitative tightening is far from over, and even when it is, a return to ZIRP seems highly unlikely.
And while already politicos on both sides of the aisle have been jockeying to spin the Fed’s decision for maximum partisan advantage, the Fed has stuck so closely to the script that it’s difficult to imagine either side succeeding in claiming that monetary policy has rigged the 2024 election. By the time Powell announced the September rate cut, let alone, by the time it even trickled down to reduced credit card APRs and mortgage rates, early voting had already begun in lynchpin swing states such as Pennsylvania, with five more states commencing before the month’s end.
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It’s not the Fed has played its part perfectly. Far from it — the Fed’s complicity in financing the bipartisan coronavirus spending spree in 2020 and then its refusal to cut off President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris in 2021 is why the economy suffered its worst inflationary crisis in 40 years in the first place.
But by its narrow definition of success, the Fed might have pulled off the impossible, and by that, I don’t mean balancing full employment with basic price stability. It’s too soon to say that it has achieved a soft landing, but as far as evading blame from Washington, D.C., and Wall Street, Powell has gotten his greatest wish: insulating the Fed from the institutional blame game of 2024.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
