There is a whole industry dedicated to reading the minds of Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell and the rest of the Fed’s Open Market Committee to figure out what they’re going to do with interest rates.
On Tuesday, that industry heard Powell tell lawmakers on Capitol Hill that he’s looking for “more good data” to be confident the recent moderation in inflation readings means prices are finally under control.
Well, Powell and his colleagues got some new data from the Commerce Department Thursday morning in the form of the Consumer Price Index for the month of June. And the news was surprisingly good.
On a year-over-year basis, the inflation rate declined for the third straight month. Prices were up 3% compared to last June, that’s down from more than 9% just two years ago.
So now, the question is: What is the Fed going to do with this good data? While economists were happy with today’s inflation news, Paul Ashworth, chief North America economist with Capital Economics, said he’s hesitant to say whether this data is good enough that maybe, just maybe, consumers will see some interest rate cuts soon.
“This certainly qualifies as good data,” Ashworth said. “The Federal Reserve’s obviously a bit vague about exactly what it’s looking for.”
People do have some clues, Ashworth added. For months now, annual inflation has been inching closer to the Fed’s target of 2%. And then there’s the labor market. Steven Friedman, senior macroeconomist with MacKay Shields, said it’s finally starting to soften a bit.
“I would describe it as strong, but not tight, and that’s a subtle difference,” he said “But what it means is that the labor market is no longer a source of meaningful inflationary pressure.”
And when you zoom way out to the entire economy, there are signs that it’s cooling down, said Lauren Saidel-Baker with ITR Economics.
“GDP today is at an all-time high,” Saidel-Baker said. “So, it’s critical to note that our economy is still growing. However, the pace of growth has really come down.”
So, what more does the Fed need to see? Ken Kuttner, an economics professor at Williams College, said the Fed was caught by surprise when inflation took off a couple years ago and it was slow to raise rates.
“You can never have enough data, is the short answer,” Kuttner said. “They were definitely way behind the curve for I would say the better part of a year.”
That experience could make the Fed wary of cutting rates until it’s extra confident that inflation is under control. Kuttner said a couple more months of “good data” leading up to the Fed’s September meeting could do the trick.
“If the data we see between now and then confirm the trends we’ve been seeing in terms of moderating growth, and cooling inflation, then a rate cut in September may well be on the table,” Kuttner said.
Kuttner said he puts those odds at roughly 50-50.
