Federal Reserve officials at their last policy meeting said they still had faith that price pressures would ease at least slowly in coming months, but doubts emerged about whether the current level of interest rates was high enough to guarantee that outcome and “various” officials said they’d be willing to hike borrowing costs again if inflation surged.That meeting was held before data showed the pace of consumer price increases beginning to cool again in April, yet reflected what U.S. central bank officials since then have said is increased uncertainty about the path of inflation and monetary policy.”Participants … noted that they continued to expect that inflation would return to 2 percent over the medium term,” according to the minutes of the April 30-May 1 meeting, but “the disinflation would likely take longer than previously thought.”While the policy response for now would “involve maintaining” the Fed’s benchmark policy rate in the current 5.25 percent-5.50 percent range, “various participants mentioned a willingness to tighten policy further should risks to inflation materialize in a way that such an action became appropriate,” the minutes said, employing a modifier not included in the usual set of words – like some, many, and most – used in the minutes to give a sense of how many officials voiced a particular opinion.Fed Chair Jerome Powell and other policymakers have since said they feel further rate hikes are unlikely.

But the minutes released on Wednesday excluded specific reference to that notion and to the likelihood of rate cuts this year.The March 19-20 meeting minutes said that participants had “judged that the policy rate was likely at its peak for this tightening cycle, and almost all participants judged that it would be appropriate to move policy to a less restrictive stance at some point this year if the economy evolved broadly as they expected.”In place of that broad judgment, the latest minutes showed an emerging debate about just how tight monetary policy is, an important consideration that could bear on how fast inflation returns to the central bank’s 2 percent target — or whether it gets there at all.The impact of high interest rates on the economy has not been as dramatic as some Fed officials expected, a positive development for the job market in particular but one that has left a question mark about inflation.”Although monetary policy was seen as restrictive, many participants commented on their uncertainty about the degree of restrictiveness,” said the minutes from the last meeting, with officials mentioning that changes in the economy may have simply rendered any given level of the Fed’s short-term interest rate less effective in influencing how consumers and businesses spend and invest.U.S. Treasury yields edged up after the release of the minutes and traders pulled back slightly from bets on Fed rate cuts this year, with rate-futures contracts reflecting only about even odds the central bank will reduce rates more than once this year.”Higher for longer is the official mantra,” said Chris Zaccarelli, chief investment officer at Independent Advisor Alliance, adding that although Fed officials “wanted to cut rates, they are not going to be able to do 카지노사이트킹 that in the near future.”