Fed officials emphasize March pause amid strategy rethink

Bloomberg

The policy shift under way at the Federal Reserve will affect new forecasts to be published later this month and also their longer-run strategy.
Recent remarks by Chairman Jerome Powell, Vice Chairman Richard Clarida, Governor Lael Brainard and New York Fed President John Williams have all signalled their contentment with letting the policy rate rest at 2.25 percent to 2.5 percent when they meet March 19-20, and perhaps for a few meetings after that.
“With nothing in the outlook demanding an immediate policy response, and particularly given muted inflation pressures, the committee has adopted a patient, wait-and-see approach to considering any alteration in the stance of policy,” Powell said in the text of his remarks to the Stanford Institute of Economic Policy Research.
The March pause — fully priced into futures markets — is happening at a time when the US economy is close to full employment and the Fed’s 2 percent inflation goal. Even so, Fed officials have cited risks to their forecast, including slowing global growth and domestic and international policy uncertainty with events like Brexit looming, as a good reason to watch and wait for a while.
‘DOWNSIDE RISKS’
“Heightened downside risks to output and employment would argue for a softer federal funds rate path even if the modal outlook for the economy were unchanged,” Brainard said in a speech.
But Fed officials also say inflation in this business cycle is more subdued, so that their policy response can be even more measured. Beyond that is the realisation that low inflation and low interest rates may be a permanent feature in advanced economies now, leaving central banks too close the zero boundary on interest rates where policy is less potent.
“We have to take seriously this problem of the lower bound and the fact that we’re so close to zero, even when rates are at neutral,’’ Powell said in a question-and-answer session following his remarks.
“Neutral’’ is a reference to the estimated policy rate setting that neither speeds up nor slows economic growth. Fed officials say they’re close to that level now.
“This is a problem for central banks around the world,’’ Powell added. “And all of the experiences we have to date of economies that go to the zero lower bound involve long periods of low inflation and low growth, so we need to try to find a better approach to that.’’

STRATEGY REVIEW
That could be roughly translated to: the Fed wants to do its part to avoid an economy stuck in a lasting phase of low growth, low inflation, with a high debt-to-GDP ratio — much like Japan.
Powell has asked the Fed to conduct a full-scale strategy review. The chairman, vice chairman, Brainard and Williams have all cited so-called make-up strategies as an area of interest. One idea is to aim for an average inflation target: for example, letting price indexes run above 2 percent for a while to make up for past undershoots. The Fed’s having this conversation in the open, and investors are pondering how it will change the way they allocate money to markets. After all, the Fed’s preferred inflation barometer has spent more time under 2 percent in this expansion than over it.