The meetings from the early May meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee — the part of the Federal Reserve that sets interest rates — were just released. They show that anyone who had held hope for rate cuts in the near future will likely have to wait until the end of the year.
National economics is an area where expectations can beget results. As the minutes said, “market participants appeared to interpret recently announced trade policy changes as a negative supply shock that could restrain domestic activity relative to foreign activity in the near term.” The market participants are large investment decision-makers.
It’s important to remember that the FOMC meeting was weeks ago. Whipsaw changes in tariffs, announcements about geopolitical negotiations, stocks rising and falling and rising again, a trend in falling bond prices and growing yields, a roller coaster ride of consumer confidence, and other economic signals suggest that no one at all knows where things are going.
The Fed, in the voice of Chair Jerome Powell, has noted that it is facing a challenge in balancing its dual mandates of maintaining stable prices and maximum sustainable employment. The difficulty is that, in orthodox monetary theory, the two classically have separate requirements. Price stability is generally an issue of inflation, which means the economy is overheated. In that situation, the Fed would increase interest rates to slow demand by consumers and businesses by making it harder for anyone to borrow money.
On the other hand, when employment starts to fall, the Fed would lower interest rates to make it easier for businesses to borrow money and expand their activities.
The Fed doesn’t have the breadth of tools to achieve both results simultaneously. It has to choose — and no one at the central bank knows which of the two conditions might happen.
Another consideration is the evidence the Fed looks for in making its decisions: data. Economic data runs a month or more, even a quarter or two, behind the present. Additionally, data often isn’t decisive. Things may move back and forth without a definitive direction. Currently, the Fed doesn’t know which way conditions will break and whether prices or labor will be the segment that needs the most help, or even when that could occur. For now, they are following the data and waiting for enough of a pattern to make a decision.
As the Fed put it, “In considering the outlook for monetary policy, participants agreed that with economic growth and the labor market still solid and current monetary policy moderately restrictive, the Committee was well positioned to wait for more clarity on the outlooks for inflation and economic activity.”
Oxford Economics wrote in an email that the May meeting only “reinforced the Fed’s wait-and-see approach.” They have no better idea what the administration is going to do than anyone else. More importantly, they don’t know for certain what effects all this will have on the economy.
The next few weeks and months are likely to be difficult. The ping pong balls keep flying back and forth over the net. A reporter asked Trump about a new term of growing popularity: TACO, or Trump Always Chickens Out. People in other countries expect that Trump will eventually back down.
Perhaps that is somewhat better than not knowing what will happen, but it still means a kabuki theater of pretense that rational actors can still do what they want and make plans. The reality is being caught in a tidal pool, waiting for the next wave to break.
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