Some Federal Reserve officials have begun to acknowledge that they were too slow to respond to rapid inflation last year, a delay that is forcing them to constrain the economy more abruptly now — and one that could hold lessons for the policy path ahead. Inflation began to accelerate last spring, but Fed policymakers and […]
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The Federal Reserve is poised to set out a path to rapidly withdraw support from the economy at its meeting on Wednesday — and while it hopes it can contain inflation without causing a recession, that is far from guaranteed. Whether the central bank can gently land the economy is likely to serve as a […]
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The war in Ukraine, along with Europe’s commitment to end its dependence on Russian energy, has suddenly muddied the outlook for economic growth and inflation on the continent. In this challenging environment, the European Central Bank decided on Thursday to speed up its exit from its bond-buying program to counter rising inflation. Inflation is already […]
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Federal Reserve officials are preparing to pull back their economic help as inflation remains stubbornly high and the labor market swiftly heals, and they are signaling clearly that the last business cycle is a poor template for what comes next. During the economic expansion that stretched from the global financial crisis to the start of […]
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Federal Reserve officials signaled on Wednesday that they were on track to raise interest rates in March, given that inflation has been running far above policymakers’ target and that labor market data suggests employees are in short supply. Central bankers left rates unchanged at near-zero — where they have been set since March 2020 — […]
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That caused the Fed to change course late last year — and to do so fairly abruptly. “Inflation really popped up in the late spring last year, and we had a view — it was very, very widely held in the forecasting community — that this would be temporary,” Mr. Powell said in December. But […]
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Leonard recounts this saga via the powerful and enraging story of a machine operator named John Feltner, who had been hired there after driving 15 hours from his home in Dallas for his job interview. He and his wife settled into a suburb outside Indianapolis and started saving to buy a home. Feltner was a […]
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