Washington (EFE) economic data.
“We have some potentially important data to analyze (…) Once again, we have not made any decision on the March meeting and we will not do it until we see the additional data,” he said in a hearing before a House committee of United States representatives.
The next meeting of the Fed’s Open Market Committee that must decide on interest rates will be held between March 21 and 22.
Powell thus qualified the words he pronounced before the Senate on Tuesday, in the first of the two appearances that, by mandate, he has to offer to the Chambers every six months to inform them of the monetary policies carried out by the regulator.
Expectations around interest rates
In his opening address to the Senate, Powell said that “if the totality of the data indicates that more rapid tightening is warranted, we would be prepared to accelerate the pace of rate hikes”, words that were interpreted as a warning from the acceleration of rates and that made the markets wobble, with falls in the main indices.
Today he repeated the same speech but, when he got to that part, he introduced a sentence: “And I emphasize that we still do not have the data”, a clarification on which he insisted during question time.
In order to reduce inflation, the Fed has carried out a series of rate hikes, eight since a year ago. The last one occurred on February 1 and was less than the previous ones, 0.25 points.
With this rise, the rates stood in a range of 4.5% and 4.75%, the highest figure since September 2007.
Since it reached its peak in June (9.1%) of 2022, inflation in the United States has eased to 6.4% in January, when it fell for the seventh consecutive month, although only one tenth, a rate of decline that It’s too slow, according to the Fed.