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Anonymous ID: 271ad9 Feb. 23, 2019, 8:42 p.m. No.5355530   🗄️.is 🔗kun

Fed's policy pause sets stage for broad overhaul

 

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NEW YORK/SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - When Federal Reserve policymakers last month put a three-year rate-hike campaign on hold and backed ending a yearlong push to shrink their $4 trillion balance sheet, they cited increased risks to U.S. economic growth and the need for more time to sort through the data.

 

But whether by design or by happenstance, their policy pause effectively cleans the central bank's slate ahead of what could be a massive overhaul of how they manage the U.S. economy, including what tools it uses and how it communicates to the public.

 

Behind the Fed's decision to spend the next year rethinking how it should go about ensuring that prices remain stable and employment plentiful are some of the same structural economic changes that led the U.S. central bank to put its current policy on hold in the first place.

 

The connections between the Fed's new "patient" stance on policy, its decision to leave its balance sheet bigger than it had previously anticipated, and what looks set to be a tough debate over a possible new policy framework were on full display for the first time at a conference Friday on monetary policy in New York.

 

There, the influential chief of the New York Fed, John Williams, nodded to the U.S. economy's new normal, where unemployment is plumbing its lowest levels in nearly 50 years, but inflation is barely touching the Fed's 2-percent goal.

 

And though the Fed needs to guard against a surge in inflation, Williams said, "we must be equally vigilant that inflation expectations do not get anchored at too low a level."

 

San Francisco Fed President Mary Daly, also speaking at the conference, concurred.

 

"Inflation has been below our target for a long time," Daly said. "Complacency can go both ways and it's important to be vigilant on both sides of the target, not just on the upside but also on the downside"

 

One central question in the Fed's policy rethink is whether the Fed should react to periods of low inflation by allowing inflation to run hot for a time, Fed Vice Chair Richard Clarida said in a speech Friday that outlined the scope of the Fed's broad review.

 

Such a strategy could mean the Fed seeks to maintain an average rate of 2-percent inflation over any given period, rather than its current strategy of targeting its 2-percent level without regard to whether it has been able to meet that goal so far.

 

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https://www.marketscreener.com/news/Fed-s-policy-pause-sets-stage-for-broad-overhaul–28054623/?countview=0