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High inflation to delay rate cuts, uncertain economy

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The economy still isn’t behaving the way anyone expected.

The job market is growing at a blockbuster pace, even though high interest rates usually slow hiring or cause layoffs. Consumers are spending on essentials and extravagances alike, suggesting people don’t fear trouble ahead. The stock market is up, and worries of a recession have largely faded.

But inflation, after easing remarkably in 2023, has stayed unexpectedly hot since the start of the year. And that’s confounding economists and Federal Reserve officials who are still struggling to understand the post-pandemic world.

Higher borrowing costs were widely expected to tackle inflation with full force, to bring the roaring economy crashing down — or both. Instead, things seem to be settling in a confusing spot, with price increases still above normal, but other parts of the economy holding strong, too. The result is more uncertainty for experts, consumers and businesses alike about what might happen next in an economy that is still resisting the usual rules.

“We got through some of that ‘transitory’ part,” said Diane Swonk, chief economist at KPMG, referring to more temporary sources of inflation that drove price increases in 2021 and 2022, such as supply chain problems and energy prices. “We haven’t gotten to the fundamental part — and the hard part.”

When the year started, it appeared the Fed and White House had pulled off the unthinkable: no recession, easing inflation and a still-booming job market. That momentum led Fed leaders in December to pencil in three interest rate cuts this year, projections they repeated last month.

But then January and February price data came in unexpectedly high. For a while, policymakers hoped those were bumps in the road, not a more worrisome trend. But March data, released this week by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, cemented any lingering doubts.

Officials have long said they need a bit more assurance that inflation is trending down before they can cut rates. But after March’s disappointing report, central bankers might be losing the confidence they already had. So long as other strengths like the job market hold up, the Fed won’t have a compelling reason to cut rates and take pressure off the economy while inflation keeps festering.

As a result, financial markets and Fed watchers are no longer banking on June for an initial rate cut. The farther the timeline gets pushed back — possibly to Fed meetings in July, September or November — the closer the central bank bumps up against the presidential election, despite concerted attempts to avoid politics at all costs. On the flip side, the longer the Fed leaves rates high, the more it risks softening a generally strong economy just as President Biden and former president Donald Trump duel over who can best manage it.

“The Fed doesn’t want to be influenced by the political calendar,” said Eswar Prasad, an economist at Cornell University and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “The closer we get to November for that interest rate pivot, the more uncomfortable that is going to be.”

Part of the reason officials would otherwise want to cut rates is because too much pressure on the economy can cause other problems, even if inflation ebbs. Rates that stay high for a long time can eventually wear on the job market, persuading employers to stop adding jobs or lay off the staff they already have.

That leaves the Fed to balance its precarious inflation fight against daunting risks. The central bank is charged with keeping inflation in check and maximizing employment at the same time, even though those goals can conflict.

“If we ease too much or too soon, we could see inflation come back,” Fed Chair Jerome H. Powell said at a news conference last month. “And if we ease too late, we could do unnecessary harm to employment and people’s working lives.”

When the Fed raced to hoist interest rates two years ago, the underlying picture was different. Broken supply chains sent prices up for all kinds of goods as people rushed to buy used cars, at-home office equipment and backyard furniture. A jolt of government stimulus also injected fresh demand into the economy, sending checks into peoples’ pockets as they filled restaurants, concert venues and hotels that were hobbling back from the pandemic.

The Fed was late to respond. To catch up, officials doled out whopping interest rate hikes to get borrowing costs high enough to slow the economy. The overwhelming expectation was that those moves would cause a recession. Powell warned of pain ahead.

Not only did the Fed avoid a downturn, but inflation came down significantly, too: After peaking at an annual rate of 7.1 percent in mid-2022, the Fed’s preferred inflation gauge clocked in at 2.5 percent in February. (Another inflation measure released this week peaked at 9.1 percent in June 2022 and now sits at 3.5 percent.)

Yet it isn’t entirely clear how much of that progress came from interest rate hikes alone. Econ 101 teaches that high rates cool demand by making it more expensive to get a mortgage, buy a car or grow a business. But surprises came there, too. The housing market, for example, went through a brief downturn but rebounded quickly. Home prices are still inching up, and many buyers haven’t shied from mortgage rates around 6 or 7 percent.

Much of the relief on inflation came from supply chains getting back into gear. Gas and energy costs also fell dramatically, a welcome pivot after they surged following Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

The stickiest inflation category — which includes services like housing, hospitality, leisure and health care — still hasn’t had a major breakthrough.

“We’re probably in a much better place than many of us thought we’d be, in terms of a year ago,” said Jason Furman, a former Obama administration economist now at Harvard University. “We’re in a much worse place than we were hoping three months ago.”

At his news conference last month, Powell outlined what it would take to get inflation to hit the Fed’s 2 percent target — and put the economy on a path to rate cuts. Goods prices would need to keep simmering down. Housing costs would need to fall in line. Services inflation would need to cool, too.

But he also acknowledged what’s still unknown.

“Some combination of those three things” will be necessary, Powell said, “and it may be different from the combination we had before the pandemic.”

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What student loan borrowers should know as Trump targets PSLF

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President Donald Trump has signed an executive order that aims to limit eligibility for a popular student loan forgiveness program.

According to Trump’s executive order, borrowers employed by organizations that do work involving “illegal immigration, human smuggling, child trafficking, pervasive damage to public property and disruption of the public order” will “not be eligible for public service loan forgiveness.”

The Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, which President George W. Bush signed into law in 2007, allows many not-for-profit and government employees to have their federal student loans canceled after 10 years of payments.

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The order says that PSLF “has misdirected tax dollars into activist organizations that not only fail to serve the public interest, but actually harm our national security and American values.”

Consumer advocates say that is not accurate, and were quick to condemn Trump’s move, accusing the president of depriving debt forgiveness to those who work in fields he does not approve of.

“The PSLF program, which was created by Congress almost 20 years ago, does not permit the administration to pick and choose which non-profits should qualify,” said Jessica Thompson, senior vice president of The Institute for College Access & Success.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request from CNBC for comment.

Here’s what borrowers in the program need to know.

Unclear which organizations could be excluded

For now, the language in the president’s order was fairly vague. As a result, it remains unclear exactly which organizations will no longer be considered a qualifying employer under PSLF, experts said.

The Trump administration might try “to exclude jobs that they deem objectionable,” said higher education expert Mark Kantrowitz.

What might that mean?

In his first few weeks in office, Trump’s executive orders have targeted immigrants, transgender and nonbinary people and those who work to increase diversity across the private and public sector. Many nonprofits work in these spaces, providing legal support or doing advocacy and education work.

“Borrowers that work for those organizations are concerned,” said Betsy Mayotte, president of The Institute of Student Loan Advisors, a nonprofit.

Changes could take ‘a year or more’

Borrowers in the PSLF program won’t see an immediate effect. Trump’s order requested an update to the regulations regarding the program, she said: “That process can take a year or more.”

“I also suspect that this will be challenged in court,” Mayotte said. “The bottom line is that 501(c)(3)s are eligible for PSLF under the law. An EO can’t change.”

Changes also can’t be retroactive, she said. That means that if you are currently working for or previously worked for an organization that the Trump administration later excludes from the program, you’ll still get credit for that time, at least up until the changes go into effect.

For now, those pursuing PSLF should print out a copy of their payment history on StudentAid.gov. Keep a record of the number of qualifying payments you’ve made so far.

With the PSLF help tool, borrowers can search for a list of qualifying employers and access the employer certification form. Try to fill out this form at least once a year, experts say.

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Do tariffs protect U.S. jobs and industry? Economists say no

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President Donald Trump addresses a joint session of Congress at the U.S. Capitol on March 4, 2025.

Mandel Ngan-Pool/Getty Images

President Donald Trump has spoken of tariffs as a job-creating behemoth.

Tariffs will “create jobs like we have never seen before,” Trump said Tuesday during a joint session of Congress.

Economists disagree.

In fact, the tariff policies Trump has pursued since taking office would likely have the opposite effect, they said.

“It costs American jobs,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s.

He categorized tariffs imposed broadly as a “lose-lose.”

“There are no winners here in the trade war we’re seemingly being engulfed in,” Zandi said. 

A barrage of tariffs

The Trump administration has announced a barrage of tariffs since Inauguration Day.

Trump has imposed an additional duty of 20% on all imports from China. He put 25% tariffs on imports from Canada and Mexico, the U.S.’ two biggest trade partners. (Just days after those took effect, the president delayed levies on some products for a month.)

Tariffs of 25% on steel and aluminum are set to take effect Wednesday, while duties on copper and lumber and reciprocal tariffs on all U.S. trade partners could be coming in the not-too-distant future.

There’s a deceptively simple logic to the protective power of such economic policy.

Tariffs generally aim to help U.S. companies compete more effectively with foreign competitors, by making it more expensive for companies to source products from overseas. U.S. products look more favorable, thereby lending support to domestic industry and jobs.

Workers pour molten steel at a machinery manufacturing company which produces for export in Hangzhou, in China’s eastern Zhejiang province on March 5, 2025.

AFP via Getty Images

There’s some evidence of such benefits for targeted industries.

For example, steel tariffs during Trump’s first term reduced imports of steel from other nations by 24%, on average, over 2018 to 2021, according to a 2023 report by the U.S. International Trade Commission. They also raised U.S. steel prices and domestic production by about 2% each, the report said.

New steel tariffs set to take effect March 12 would also “likely boost” steel prices, Shannon O’Neil and Julia Huesa, researchers at the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote in February.

Higher prices would likely benefit U.S. producers and add jobs to the steel industry’s current headcount, around 140,000, they said.

Tariffs have ‘collateral damage’

While tariffs’ protection may “relieve” struggling U.S. industries, it comes with a cost, Lydia Cox, an assistant economics professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and international trade expert, wrote in a 2022 paper.

Tariffs create higher input costs for other industries, making them “vulnerable” to foreign competition, Cox wrote.

These spillover effects hurt other sectors of the economy, ultimately costing jobs, economists said.  

Take steel, for example.

Steel tariffs raise production costs for the manufacturing sector and other steel-intensive U.S. industries, like automobiles, farming machinery, household appliances, construction and oil drilling, O’Neil and Huesa wrote.

China issues retaliatory tariffs

Cox studied the effects of steel tariffs imposed by former president George W. Bush in 2002-03, and found they were responsible for 168,000 fewer jobs per year in steel-using industries, on average — more jobs than there are in the entire steel sector.

Tariffs are a “pretty blunt instrument,” said Cox during a recent webinar for the Harvard Kennedy School.

They create “a lot of collateral damage,” she added.

Why tariffs are a ‘tax on exports’

Trucks head to the Ambassador Bridge between Windsor, Canada and Detroit, Michigan on March 4, 2025.

Bill Pugliano | Getty Images

Such damage includes retaliatory tariffs imposed by other nations, which make it pricier for U.S.-based exporters to sell their goods abroad, economists said.

Tariffs imposed during Trump’s first-term — on products like washing machines, steel and aluminum — hit $290 billion of U.S. imports with an average 24% tariff by August 2019, according to a 2020 paper published by the U.S. Federal Reserve. Those levies ultimately translated to a 2% tariff on all U.S. exports after accounting for foreign retaliation, it found.

“A tax on imports is effectively a tax on exports,” Erica York, senior economist at the Tax Foundation, wrote last year for the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.

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Damage to the U.S. economy from those first-term Trump tariffs “clearly” amounted to “many times” more than the wages of newly created jobs, economists Larry Summers, former Treasury secretary during the Clinton administration, and Phil Gramm, a former U.S. senator (R-Texas), wrote in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed.

(President Joe Biden kept most of Trump’s tariffs in place.)

U.S. trade partners have already begun fighting back against Trump’s recent tranche of tariffs.

China put tariffs of up to 15% on many U.S. agricultural goods — which are the largest U.S. exports to China — starting Monday. Canada also put $21 billion of retaliatory tariffs on U.S. goods like orange juice, peanut butter, coffee, appliances, footwear, cosmetics, motorcycles and paper products.

President Trump alluded to the potential economic pain of his tariff policies during his address to Congress.

“There will be a little disturbance, but we are okay with that,” he said. “It won’t be much.”

U.S. economy resilient despite 'agent of chaos' Trump, economist says

While many economists don’t yet forecast a U.S. recession, Trump in a Fox News interview on Sunday didn’t rule out the possibility of a downturn as tariffs take effect — though he said the economy would benefit in the long term. If a recession were to happen, it would weigh on protected sectors, too, economists said.

Voters elected President Trump with a mandate to institute an economic agenda that includes tariffs, Kush Desai, a spokesperson for the White House, said in an e-mailed statement.

“Tariffs played a key role in the industrial ascent of the United States stretching back to the 1800s through William McKinley’s presidency,” Desai said.

‘Disappointing results’ of Trump-era tariff policies

There is a historical precedent for the trade war that’s breaking out: The Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930, which triggered a reduction in exports and failed to boost agricultural prices for the farmers it sought to protect, Michael Strain, director of economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, wrote in a 2024 paper.

Economists also believe the Smoot-Hawley tariff exacerbated the Great Depression.

While a nearly century-old economic policy doesn’t necessarily point to what will happen in the modern era, protectionist policies from the post-2017 years have — like Smoot-Hawley — “had disappointing results,” Strain wrote.

Evidence from recent years suggests protectionism may actually hurt the workers it seeks to help, Strain said.

For example, Trump’s first-term tariffs reduced total manufacturing employment by a net 2.7%, Aaron Flaaen and Justin Pierce, economists at the Federal Reserve Board, wrote in 2024. That’s after accounting for a 0.4% boost to employment in manufacturing jobs protected by tariffs, they found.

The 2018-19 trade war “failed to revive domestic manufacturing” and actually reduced jobs in the broad manufacturing sector, Strain wrote.

The share of U.S. employment coming from manufacturing jobs has been falling since the end of World War II, largely because technological advances have increased workers’ productivity, Strain said. It would be more helpful to direct economic policy toward connecting workers to jobs of the future, he said.

“Trade — like technological advances — is disruptive, but attempts to entomb the U.S. economy in amber are not a helpful response,” he wrote.

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Rules for repaying Social Security benefits just got stricter

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If you receive more Social Security benefits than you are owed, you may face a 100% default withholding rate from your monthly checks once a new policy goes into effect.

The change announced last week by the Social Security Administration marks a reversal from a 10% default withholding rate that was put in place last year after some beneficiaries received letters demanding immediate repayments for sums that were sometimes tens of thousands of dollars.

The discrepancy — called overpayments — happens when Social Security beneficiaries receive more money than they are owed.

The erroneous payment amounts may occur when beneficiaries fail to report to the Social Security Administration changes in their circumstances that may affect their benefits, according to a 2024 Congressional Research Service report. Overpayments can also happen if the agency does not process the information promptly or due to errors in the way data was entered, how a policy was applied or in the administrative process, according to the report.

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The Social Security Administration paid about $6.5 billion in retirement and disability benefit overpayments in fiscal year 2022, which represents 0.5% of total benefits paid, the Congressional Research Service said in its 2024 report. The agency also paid about $4.6 billion in overpayments for Supplemental Security Income, or SSI, benefits in that year, or about 8% of total benefits paid.

The Social Security Administration recovered about $4.9 billion in Social Security and SSI overpayments in fiscal year 2023. However, the agency had about $23 billion in uncollected overpayments at the end of the 2023 fiscal year, according to the Congressional Research Service.

By defaulting to a 100% withholding rate for overpayments, the Social Security Administration said it may recover about $7 billion in the next decade.  

“We have the significant responsibility to be good stewards of the trust funds for the American people,” Lee Dudek, acting commissioner of the Social Security Administration, said in a statement. “It is our duty to revise the overpayment repayment policy back to full withholding, as it was during the Obama administration and first Trump administration, to properly safeguard taxpayer funds.”

New overpayment policy goes into effect March 27

The new 100% withholding rate will apply to new overpayments of Social Security benefits, according to the agency. The withholding rate for SSI overpayments will remain at 10%.

Social Security beneficiaries who are overpaid benefits after March 27 will automatically be subject to the new 100% withholding rate.

Individuals affected will have the right to appeal both the overpayment decision and the amount, according to the agency. They may also ask for a waiver of the overpayment, if either they cannot afford to pay the money back or if they believe they are not at fault. While an initial appeal or waiver is pending, the agency will not require repayment.

Beneficiaries who cannot afford to fully repay the Social Security Administration may also request a lower recovery rate either by calling the agency or visiting their local office.

For beneficiaries who had an overpayment before March 27, the withholding rate will stay the same and no action is required, the agency said.

Some call 100% withholding rate ‘clawback cruelty’

The new overpayment policy goes into effect about one year after former Social Security Commissioner Martin O’Malley implemented a 10% default withholding rate.

The change was prompted by financial struggles some beneficiaries faced in repaying large sums to the Social Security Administration.

At a March 2024 Senate committee hearing, O’Malley called the policy of intercepting 100% of a benefit check “clawback cruelty.”

At the same hearing, Sen. Raphael Warnock, D-Georgia, recalled how one constituent who was overpaid $58,000 could not afford to pay her rent after the Social Security Administration reduced her monthly checks.

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Following the Social Security Administration’s announcement that it will return to 100% as the default withholding rate, the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare said it is concerned the agency may be more susceptible to overpayment errors as it cuts staff.

“This action, ostensibly taken to cut costs at SSA, needlessly punishes beneficiaries who receive overpayment notices — usually through no fault of their own,” the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, an advocacy organization, said in a statement.

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