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Hopes for more Fed rate cuts dim as Powell notes hot CPI means ‘we’re not quite there yet’

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Cartons of eggs are displayed at a grocery store with a warning that limits will be placed on purchases as bird flu continues to affect the egg industry on Feb. 10, 2025 in New York City. 

Spencer Platt | Getty Images

A Federal Reserve interest rate cut won’t be coming until at least September, if at all this year, following a troubling inflation report Wednesday, according to updated market pricing.

Futures markets shifted from the expectation of a June cut and possibly another before the end of the year to no moves until the fall, with a minimal chance of a follow-up before the end of 2025.

“The Fed will see January’s hot inflation print as confirmation that price pressures continue to bubble beneath the economy’s surface,” Bill Adams, chief economist at Comerica, wrote in commentary that echoed others around Wall Street. “That will reinforce the Fed’s inclination to at least slow and possibly even end rate cuts in 2025.”

Reduced optimism for Fed easing came after the January consumer price index report showed a 0.5% monthly gain, pushing the annual inflation rate to 3%, a touch higher than December and only slightly lower than the 3.1% reading in January 2024. Excluding food and energy, the news was even worse, with a 3.3% rate that showed core inflation, which the Fed tends to rely on more even higher, also rising and holding well above the central bank’s goal.

Fed Chair Jerome Powell, in an appearance Wednesday before the House Financial Services Committee, insisted the Fed had made “great progress” on inflation from its cycle peak “but we’re not quite there yet. So we want to keep policy restrictive for now.”

As the Fed targets 2% inflation and the report showed no recent progress, it also dimmed hopes that the central bank will view further policy easing as appropriate after it lopped a full percentage point off its benchmark short-term borrowing rate in 2024.

Fed funds futures trading pointed to just a 2.5% chance of a March cut; only 13.2% in May, up to 22.8% in June, then 41.2% in July and finally up to 55.9% in September, according to the CME Group’s FedWatch gauge as of late Wednesday morning. However, that would leave the probability still up in the air until October, when futures contracts pricing implies a 62.1% probability.

Odds of a second cut by the end of 2025 were at just 31.3%, with pricing not indicating another reduction until late 2026. The fed funds rate is currently targeted in a range between 4.25%-4.5%.

The issues raised in the CPI report are not happening in isolation. Policymakers also are watching White House trade policy, with President Donald Trump pushing aggressive tariffs that also could boost prices and complicate the Fed’s desire to get to its goal.

“There is no getting away from the fact that this is a hot report and with the sense that potential tariffs run upside risk for inflation the market is understandably of the view the Federal Reserve is going to find it challenging to justify rate cuts in the near future,” said James Knightley, chief international economist at ING.

While the Fed pays attention to CPI and other similar price measures, its preferred inflation gauge is the personal consumption expenditures index, which the Bureau of Economic Analysis will release later in February. Elements from CPI filter into the PCE reading, and Citigroup said it expects to see core PCE fall to 2.6% for January, a 0.2 percentage point decline from December.

Economics

Andrew Bailey on why UK-U.S. trade deal won’t end uncertainty

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Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey attends the central bank’s Monetary Policy Report press conference at the Bank of England, in the City of London, on May 8, 2025.

Carlos Jasso | Afp | Getty Images

Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey told CNBC on Thursday that the U.K. was heading for more economic uncertainty, despite the country being the first to strike a trade agreement with the U.S. under President Donald Trump’s controversial tariff regime.

“The tariff and trade situation has injected more uncertainty into the situation… There’s more uncertainty now than there was in the past,” Bailey told CNBC in an interview.

“A U.K.-U.S. trade agreement is very welcome in that sense, very welcome. But the U.K. is a very open economy,” he continued.

That means that the impact from tariffs on the U.K. economy comes not just from its own trade relationship with Washington, but also from those of the U.S. and the rest of the world, he said.

“I hope that what we’re seeing on the U.K.-U.S. trade side will be the first of many, and it will be repeated by a whole series of trade agreements, but we have to see that happen of course, and where it actually ends up.”

“Because, of course, we are looking at tariff levels that are probably higher than they were beforehand.”

Trump unveils United Kingdom trade deal, first since ‘reciprocal’ tariff pause

In Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Report released Thursday, the word “uncertainty” was used 41 times across its 97 pages, up from 36 times in February, according to a CNBC tally.

The U.K. central bank cut interest rates by a quarter percentage point on Thursday, taking its key rate to 4.25%. The decision was highly divided among the seven members of its Monetary Policy Committee, with five voting for the 25 basis point cut, two voting to hold rates and two voting to reduce by a larger 50 basis points.

Bailey said that while some analysts had perceived the rate decision as more hawkish than expected — in other words, leaning toward holding rates elevated than slashing them rapidly — he was not surprised by the close vote.

“What it reflects is that there are two sides, there are risks on both sides here,” he told CNBC.

“We could get a much more severe weakness of demand than we were expecting, that could then pass through to a weaker outlook for inflation than we were expecting.”

“There’s a risk on the other side that we could get some combination of more persistence in the inflation effects that are gradually working their way through the system,” such as in wages and energy, while “supply capacity in the economy is weaker,” he said.

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Economics

Trump knocks down a controversial pillar of civil-rights law

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IN THE DELUGE of 145 executive orders issued by President Donald Trump (on subjects as disparate as “Restoring American Seafood Competitiveness” and “Maintaining Acceptable Water Pressure in Showerheads”) it can be difficult to discern which are truly consequential. But one of them, signed on April 23rd under the bland headline “Restoring Equality of Opportunity and Meritocracy”, aims to remake civil-rights law. Those primed to distrust Mr Trump on such matters may be surprised to learn that the president’s target is not just important but also well-chosen.

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Economics

Harvard has more problems than Donald Trump

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A Programme at Harvard Divinity School aspired to “deZionize Jewish consciousness”. During “privilege trainings”, working-class Harvard students were instructed that, by being Jewish, they were oppressing wealthier, better prepared classmates. A course in Harvard’s graduate school of public health, “The Settler Colonial Determinants of Health”, sought to “interrogate the relationships between settler colonialism, Zionism, antisemitism, and other forms of racism”: Will these findings by Harvard’s task-force on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias, released on April 29th, shock anyone? Maybe not. Americans may be numb by now to bulletins about the excesses, not to say inanities, of some leftist academics.

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