Tag Archives: Fed dots

The Fed has been reticent to become involved in the debate over trade tariffs and still looks like placing policy normalisation on ‘auto pilot’.Among the many questions posed by the recent more aggressive trade rhetoric from the Trump Administration is whether it will ‘scare’ Federal Reserve officials, and therefore interrupt the current US tightening cycle. But recent comments from Fed policymakers, including from Chair Jerome Powell, suggest that officials remain cool-headed about recent...

This week’s Fed meeting will likely to see a rise in Fed policy makers’ forecasts for 2018 growth and rates.The Federal Reserve meets on 20–21 March and is widely expected to hike rates by a quarter point (moving the interest rate on excess reserves up to 1.75%). This decision is ‘priced in’ at 100% according to Bloomberg data.The focus will be on signals for further tightening in the rest of the year, especially as there will be plenty of materials to consider (including a fresh ‘dot plot’...

Given the ongoing tightening in monetary conditions, we are leaving our forecasts for two Fed rate hikes next year unchanged for the time being.The decision by the Fed this week to raise the Fed funds rate target range by 25bp to 0.5%-0.75% was widely expected. More surprisingly for the market was certainly the upward revisions in the (in)famous ‘dot plot’. The Federal Open Market Committee’s (FOMC) median forecast for Fed funds rates at the end of 2017 was shifted up by 25bp, to 1.375%,...