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The Federal Reserve may have pretty much just hit its 2% inflation target

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Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell arrives to a news conference following the September meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee at the William McChesney Martin Jr. Federal Reserve Board Building on September 18, 2024 in Washington, DC. 

Anna Moneymaker | Getty Images

This week’s inflation data provided more evidence that the Federal Reserve is nearing its objective, fresh on the heels of the central bank’s dramatic interest rate cut just a few weeks ago.

Consumer and producer price indexes for September both came in around expectations, showing that inflation is drifting down to the central bank’s 2% target.

In fact, economists at Goldman Sachs think the Fed may already be there.

The Wall Street investment bank on Friday projected that the Commerce Department’s personal consumption expenditures price index for September will show a 12-month inflation rate of 2.04% when it is released later this month.

If Goldman is correct, that number would get rounded down to 2% and be right in line with the Fed’s long-held objective, a little over two years after inflation spiked to a 40-year high and unleashed an aggressive round of interest rate hikes. The Fed prefers the PCE as its inflation gauge though it uses a variety of inputs to make decisions.

“The overall trend over 12-, 18 months is clearly that inflation has come down a lot, and the job market has cooled to a level which is around where we think full employment is,” Chicago Fed President Austan Goolsbee said in a CNBC interview Thursday after the latest consumer price data was released. “We’d like to get both of them to stay in the space where they are right now.”

Some obstacles ahead

While keeping inflation at bay may not be an easy task, the latest data indicate that though prices are not receding from their troublesome heights of a few years ago, the rate at which they are increasing is pulling back.

The 12-month rate for the all-items consumer price index was at 2.4% in September, while the producer price index, a proxy for wholesale inflation and a leading gauge for pipeline pressures, showed an annual rate of 1.8%.

Goldman’s projection that the PCE index is heading to 2% is also about in line with tracking from the Cleveland Fed.

The central bank district’s “inflation nowcasting” dashboard pegs the 12-month headline PCE rate at 2.06% for September, which would get rounded up to 2.1%. However, on an annualized pace, inflation for the entire third quarter is running at just a 1.4% rate — well below the Fed’s 2% goal.

To be sure, there are some caveats to show that policymakers still have some work to do.

Core inflation, which excludes food and energy and is a metric that the Fed considers a better measure of longer-term trends, is expected to run at a 2.6% annual rate for the PCE in September, according to Goldman. Using just the consumer price index, core inflation was even worse in September, at 3.3%.

Fed officials, though, see the unexpectedly high shelter inflation numbers as a major driver of the core measure, which they figure will ease as a lower trend in rents works its way through the data.

Fed Chair Jerome Powell last week, addressing the rent situation, said he expects housing inflation to continue to recede while “broader economic conditions also set the table for further disinflation.”

From a policy standpoint, lower inflation opens the door for the Fed to keep cutting rates, particularly as it turns its attention to the labor market, though there’s some trepidation about how quickly it should move.

September’s half percentage point reduction to a fed funds range of 4.75% to 5% was unprecedented for an economy in expansion, and the Fed at the very least is expected to return to its normal quarter-point pace. Atlanta Fed President Raphael Bostic even said Thursday he’d be open to skipping a move altogether at the November meeting.

“Aggressive easing would risk spiking consumer demand just as it is settling into a sustainable pace,” PNC senior economist Kurt Rankin said in a post-PPI analysis. “This result would in turn put pressure on businesses to meet that demand, re-igniting gains in those businesses’ own costs as they jockey for the necessary resources to do so.”

Futures traders, meanwhile, are betting on a near-certainty that the Fed cuts rates by a quarter point at both the November and December meetings.

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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