After the December FOMC, I posted that I was sticking with a baseline, near-term-rosy Trump outlook, in which a robust economy is greeted by a Fed happily rising rates three or more times. Then as now, I had no great confidence that the rosy scenario would continue to unfold, but forecasting 3 or more rate […]

Another year of well-disguised, steady predictability in Fed policy is in the books, and the FOMC hit the trifecta at the December meeting. The Fed did what policymakers had clearly indicated they would do; the FOMC said what any reasonable policymaking body would say under these circumstances; and the dots, as usual, created a carnival […]

Like most folks who focus on such things, I expect a 25 basis point increase in the federal funds rate target range at the December FOMC meeting. Since mid-August, I’ve said that under the Fed’s consistent MO, if the economy did not break strongly in either way, we’d get one rate rise this year—most likely […]

Yesterday, CFE joined the Hutchins Center at Brookings in hosting a meeting on Fed communication. We had a vigorous discussion among an impressive group of current and former Fed officials: Ben Bernanke, Alan Blinder, Don Kohn, and Jay Powell. The Fed’s listening audience was represented by the press, bloggers, and Fed watchers: Tim Duy, Ylan […]

I hate to pull your attention away an edifying display of democracy in all its glory, so this will be brief. My prediction for today’s FOMC meeting is slightly different from what I stated before the January FOMC, but utterly unchanged from before Chair Yellen’s August Jackson Hole speech. For about a year now, I’ve […]

As I said to some of you just before the speech, if the same framework were in place, we should hear more of the sort of talk we’ve heard for three years in communication on behalf of the consensus: job market gains continuing; repeated transitory shocks still holidng down inflation; gradual rate increases continuing. That’s pretty much what happened.