Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said on Friday it is still unclear if US interest rates will need to rise further, as central bank officials balance uncertainty about the effect of past hikes in borrowing costs and recent bank credit tightening with the fact that inflation is proving hard to control.In carefully scripted remarks at a Fed research conference in which Powell was interviewed by a top US central bank staffer, the Fed chief reiterated that the central bank would now make decisions “meeting by meeting,” but also flagged that after a year of aggressive rate increases, officials “can afford to look at the data and the evolving outlook to make careful assessments”.“We face uncertainty about the lagged effects of our tightening so far, and about the extent of credit tightening from recent banking stresses,” Powell said during a panel session at the conference in Washington. “So today, our guidance is limited to identifying the factors we’ll be monitoring as we assess the extent to which additional policy firming may be appropriate to return inflation to 2 percent.”
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