Finance

Seventy years ago the Indian rupee was often found a long way from home. After India gained independence from Britain, the currency remained in use in sheikhdoms across the Arabian Sea. Until as late as 1970, some employed the Gulf rupee, a currency issued by India’s central bank.Today the picture is rather different. The rupee accounts for less than 2% of international-currency transactions, even though the Indian economy is the world’s fifth-largest. Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, would like to see the currency span the globe once again. Speaking at the 90th anniversary of the Reserve Bank of India on April 1st, Mr Modi told the central bank’s policymakers to focus on making the rupee more accessible. Historically, however, national leaders have been a lot more likely to express enthusiasm for the idea of making their currency a global one than to enact the reforms required to do so.Although the American dollar is the undisputed king of currencies, there are many with a global role of their own. The euro, the British pound, the Swiss franc, and the dollars of Australia, Canada, Hong Kong and Singapore are all examples. These currencies are found in foreign reserves and private portfolios worldwide, and used for both trade and financial transactions. In theory, there is no reason why the rupee should not join the illustrious group.Having a widely used currency brings sizeable benefits. Demand from overseas investors lowers financing costs for domestic companies, which are no longer compelled to borrow in foreign currencies. Such demand also reduces exchange-rate risks for exporters and importers, who do not need to convert currencies so often when trading, and enables the government to reduce the size of its foreign-exchange reserves.Some of the foundation stones of an international currency are being laid in India. The country now has assets that foreigners want to buy, making the rupee a potential store of value overseas. In September JPMorgan Chase, a bank, announced that it would include Indian government bonds in its emerging-market index. Bloomberg, a data provider, took the same decision last month. The explosive performance of the country’s stocks, which are up by 37% in dollar terms over the past year, has piqued global interest.The rupee is also increasingly a unit of account and a medium of exchange for foreigners. Banks from 22 countries have been permitted to open special rupee-denominated accounts, without the usual exchange limits. In August India made its first rupee payment for oil, to the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company.Yet China shows how far India has to go. Although Chinese policymakers have been trying to make the yuan a global currency for more than a decade, it still accounts for less than 3% of international trades made via SWIFT, a payments network, outside the euro zone, despite the fact that China accounts for 17% of global GDP. Moreover, 80% of such international yuan transactions occur in Hong Kong. China’s relatively closed capital account, which prevents investments from flowing freely across its borders, is the main obstacle to wider use of its currency. India’s capital account is less closed than it once was, but is still far more sheltered than that of any of the countries with a global currency.Japan provides a better example. In 1970 it accounted for 7% of global GDP—more than the 4% it does now—and its companies were beginning to make a mark abroad. But the yen was a nonentity. That changed over the following decade: in 1970, 1% of Japan’s exports were invoiced in yen; by the early 1980s, 40% were. In 1989 the yen made up 28% of all foreign-exchange transactions. It still accounts for 16% today.To make the leap to global-currency status, Japan’s leaders had to transform the country’s economy. They allowed foreigners to hold a wide range of assets, deregulated big financial institutions, and peeled back controls on capital flows and interest rates. These changes disrupted Japan’s export-oriented economic model, and undermined the power of the country’s bureaucrats.Changes just as far-reaching—and uncomfortable—will be required for any country that now wants to join the top table. Few seem to have the stomach for them at present. Indeed, without American pressure and the threat of tariffs, Japan itself might not have made such reforms. America is not about to lean on India in the same way. The desire for change will have to come from within. ■Read more from Buttonwood, our columnist on financial markets: How the “Magnificent Seven” misleads (Mar 27th)How to trade an election (Mar 21st)The private-equity industry has a cash problem (Mar 14th)Also: How the Buttonwood column got its name More

In the days after the fall of his crypto exchange, Sam Bankman-Fried opened a Google Doc and began to type. Beneath the title “probably bad ideas” he listed potential strategies, which included coming out as a Republican and arguing that “SBF died for our sins”. Mr Bankman-Fried ultimately decided against both, but there is one fiction he never let die. He has always claimed FTX was, in fact, solvent and could repay the $10.6bn it owed customers.Mr Bankman-Fried lost his empire in November 2022, but it was not until March 28th that he learned his fate: 25 years in prison. FTX’s customers-turned-creditors are still waiting. The bankruptcy is messy, extending to over 100 entities with assets lawyers say are “hopelessly” mingled. So it was surprising to possibly everybody except Mr Bankman-Fried himself when FTX told a court in January that it should be able to repay its 36,000 customers in full.FTX is good for the cash not because it was always solvent, but because administrators have clawed back assets that its last chief executive frittered away, argues John Ray III, the firm’s current boss. Rising crypto prices have also helped. Mr Ray’s team has located $7bn in assets, including luxury homes and private jets. They reckon that another $16.6bn flowed out of the company before its collapse—a third of which went to insiders and affiliates—and some of which may be clawed back.Mr Ray’s success in tracking down FTX’s cash has made claims on its estate a hot commodity. Imposters have pumped up their total value to $23.6qn (quintillion, that is). Although legitimate claims on FTX’s debt first traded at as low as one-tenth of their face value, reflecting expectations they would not be repaid, these certificates have almost entirely recovered their value. One customer is trying to regain $166m of claims in court, having sold them for a third of their face value.Mr Ray only has to repay, without interest, the dollar value of customers’ crypto accounts at the time FTX filed for Chapter 11 protection on November 11th 2022. By then, bitcoin tokens had lost a fifth of their value since Mr Bankman-Fried had barred withdrawals three days earlier. And crypto has since been on a tear. The price of solana tokens, FTX’s largest holding, has increased eleven-fold; bitcoin has more than tripled in value. This has led some creditors to sue for payment in tokens, rather than dollars. They claim the tokens are their property under FTX’s terms.Yet FTX does not have the tokens they seek. Mr Ray says there were only 105 bitcoins left on the exchange when he took over, against customer entitlements to nearly 100,000. In truth, customers seem to have made a lucky escape. Their repayment relies on FTX’s owners losing out on their $12bn claim, the federal government forgoing $43.5bn in fines and taxes, and Mr Ray being allowed to sell what remains. None of this would have happened if FTX really had been solvent. ■For more expert analysis of the biggest stories in economics, finance and markets, sign up to Money Talks, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter. More

At this point, almost everyone in global markets is familiar with the notion of higher-for-longer interest rates. Soon, they are likely to meet another concept as important for understanding central-bank policy: less-for-longer quantitative tightening (QT). This phrase describes how the Federal Reserve intends to continue reducing its assets to undo its huge bond purchases during the covid-19 pandemic. It hopes that a less-for-longer approach will ultimately leave it with a smaller balance-sheet than would otherwise be the case.This may all seem quite technical. Indeed, in one metaphor much liked by Fed officials, tracking QT should be as interesting as watching paint dry. But the very dullness—if it remains that way—has crucial implications, because it would help to make balance-sheet expansion and contraction a staple in central banks’ tool kits for staving off financial crises. Although other monetary authorities are also in the midst of QT, the Fed plays a dominant role in this experiment as the central bank for the world’s biggest economy.Chart: The EconomistThe Fed has already reduced its assets by about 16% to $7.5trn since the start of this round of QT in mid-2022—a slightly bigger reduction than its previous attempt at QT from 2017 to 2019 in the wake of the global financial crisis of 2007-09 (see chart). Yet its balance-sheet remains about 80% larger than in early 2020. Shrinking it further would give the Fed more scope to expand it again by purchasing bonds (often described as printing money) when the next financial maelstrom arrives. Managing to do so without crashing markets would also help answer critics who view quantitative easing (QE) as a cause of high inflation and bubbly asset prices.No one, including Fed officials, knows precisely the right size for the central bank’s holdings. The crucial measure is not the assets on its balance-sheet but its liabilities—specifically, the reserves held by commercial banks, which rise as a counterpart to the central bank’s bond purchases during QE. The Fed’s goal is to return banks to “ample” reserves, down from their “abundant” level today. Before the pandemic, such reserves came to about 10% of their assets. Now, they are about 15%. Given increased needs for liquidity, in part owing to stricter financial regulation, economists at Goldman Sachs, a bank, think a good level would be about 12%. This would imply that the Fed may want to shrink its balance-sheet by another $500bn.Without any fixed target, the Fed is allowing itself to be guided by market signals. In particular, it is watching whether overnight financing rates for banks trade above the rate that it pays on their reserve balances. This would be an indication that liquidity conditions have become much tighter. Money-market ructions in the autumn of 2019, including surging short-term financing costs, led the Fed to bring its previous round of QT to a screeching halt. This time, it has avoided such instability.Having got this far, officials now want to slow their asset reduction, betting that doing so will minimise the risk of market disruption and thus, over a longer period, maximise their balance-sheet shrinkage. With Jerome Powell, the Fed’s chairman, promising last month to start “fairly soon”, a fair conjecture is that the Fed will lay out plans for tapering QT after its next meeting on May 1st and begin to do so in June. Currently, the Fed is not selling securities but letting up to $95bn roll off its balance-sheet each month. A tapered QT may see it aim for a roll-off of roughly half as much.The corollary of less-for-longer QT is that the Fed will probably continue to reduce its assets for the rest of this year, which means it may be shrinking its balance-sheet (ie, monetary tightening) at the same time as it cuts interest rates (ie, monetary loosening). Although that may sound contradictory, investors should in theory price in much of the impact of tapered QT as soon as the Fed announces it.In any case, the big picture is just how few ripples the central bank’s balance-sheet reduction has caused so far—a contrast with both the turbulence of 2019 and the “taper tantrum” of 2013, when the Fed first discussed plans for trimming asset purchases. “People are getting more used to thinking about balance-sheet tools, and the Fed is more used to communicating them,” says William English, a former Fed economist. Watching paint dry is boring. But a well-painted wall can be lovely. ■For more expert analysis of the biggest stories in economics, finance and markets, sign up to Money Talks, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter. More

Winners of the Nobel prize in economics tend to sprinkle their papers with equations. Daniel Kahneman, who died on March 27th, populated his best-known work with characters and conundrums. Early readers encountered a schoolchild with an IQ of 150 in a city where the average was 100. Later they pondered the unfortunate Mr Tees, who arrived at the airport 30 minutes after his flight’s scheduled departure, and must have felt even worse when he discovered the plane had left 25 minutes late. In the 1970s readers had to evaluate ways to fight a disease that threatened to kill 600 people. In 1983 they were asked to guess the job of Linda, an outspoken, single 31-year-old philosophy graduate.Kahneman used such vignettes to expose the seductive mental shortcuts that can warp people’s thoughts and decisions. Many people, for example, think it more likely that Linda is a feminist bank-teller than a bank-teller of any kind. Presented with two responses to the disease, most choose one that saves 200 people for certain, over a chancier alternative that has a one-third chance of saving everyone and a two-thirds chance of saving no one. But if the choice is reframed, the decision is often different. Choose the first option, after all, and 400 people die for sure. Choose the second and nobody dies with a one-third probability.Teasing questions came easily to Kahneman, even in his sleep, according to “The Undoing Project”, a book by Michael Lewis. Some sprang from his teaching, which was not confined to ivory towers. He once explained the idea of “regression to the mean” to flight instructors in Israel’s air force. The reason pilots tended to improve after a sloppy manoeuvre was not because the instructor screamed at them, but because the chances of an improvement are higher if the prior performance was unusually bad.Kahneman was a harsh grader of his own incorrigible self, attentive to his own lapses. One of his early hit papers exposed the kind of methodological muddles to which he himself was vulnerable, such as the misplaced confidence that an outlier, like a child with an IQ of 150, would not skew even a small sample.Kahneman also had a lifelong—and life-preserving—interest in gossip. His childhood, as the son of Lithuanian Jews living a comfortable but edgy pre-war existence in Paris, was full of talk about other people, he once wrote. Jews in Europe had to “assess others, all the time,” a friend of his told Mr Lewis. “Who is dangerous? Who is not dangerous?…People were basically dependent on their psychological judgment.”Gossip was both a source of his work and an intended target. His bestselling book, “Thinking Fast and Slow”, was written not for decision-makers, but for “critics and gossipers”. Decision-makers were often too “cognitively busy” to notice their own biases. Pilots could be corrected by observant co-pilots and overconfident bosses might be chastened by whispers around the water-cooler, especially if the whisperers had read Kahneman’s book.To spread psychological insight, Kahneman once tried to add a course on judgment to Israel’s school curriculum. He expected the project would take a year or two. It took eight, by which time the ministry of education had lost enthusiasm; a humbling example of what he and Amos Tversky, his frequent co-author, called the “planning fallacy”. He had more success inveigling psychological wisdom into the well-guarded realm of economics, which had clung to a thin but tidy model of human decision-making.How did he do it? One answer is that he teamed up with Tversky, whose elegant mind was as ruthlessly tidy as his desk. They incorporated the cognitive illusions they had discovered into a model called “prospect theory”. According to this theory, people’s well-being responds to changes in wealth, more than levels. The changes are judged relative to a neutral reference point. That point is not always obvious and can be recast: a bonus can disappoint if it is smaller than expected. In pursuit of gains, people are risk averse. They will take a sure win of $450 over a 50% chance of winning $1,000. But people gamble to avoid losses, which loom larger than gains of an equivalent size.Prospect theory translated this model of decision-making from vignettes into the language of algebra and geometry. That made it palatable to economists. Indeed, the discipline began to claim this sort of thing as its own. Applications of psychology “came to be called behavioural economics”, lamented Kahneman, “and many psychologists discovered that the name of their trade had changed even if its content had not.”The cold-hand fallacyEven as economics was rebranding psychology, Kahneman revived an older economic tradition: “hedonimeters”, gauges of pleasure and pain that Francis Edgeworth, a 19th-century economist, had imagined. Kahneman’s hedonimeter simply asked people to rate their feelings moment-to-moment on a scale. He found that people’s ratings were often at odds with what they later recalled. Their “remembering” selves put undue weight on the end of an experience and its best or worst moment, neglecting its duration. People would rather keep their hand in painfully cold water for 90 seconds than for a minute, if the final 30 seconds were a little less cold than the preceding 60. Likewise, people sign up for hectic tourist itineraries because they look forward to looking back on them, not because they much enjoy them at the time.The implications of this discovery extend into philosophy. Which self counts? Despite its manifest flaws, the curatorial self, artfully arranging unrepresentative memories into a life story, is dear to people. “I am my remembering self,” Kahneman wrote, “and the experiencing self, who does my living, is like a stranger to me.” Now his experiencing self has done its living. And it is up to the many people he touched to do the remembering for him. ■Read more from Free exchange, our column on economics:How India could become an Asian tiger (Mar 27th)Why “Freakonomics” failed to transform economics (Mar 21st)How NIMBYs increase carbon emissions (Mar 14th)For more expert analysis of the biggest stories in economics, finance and markets, sign up to Money Talks, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter. More

U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen was scheduled to arrive in China on Thursday ahead of four full days of meetings with Chinese officials.
Her itinerary includes meetings with senior officials in the southern city of Guangzhou as well as China’s capital of Beijing.
Yellen plans to discuss China’s industrial overcapacity, among other topics, according to the Treasury.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, center, waits with others to receive Chinese President Xi Jinping at the San Francisco International Airport on Nov. 14, 2023, ahead of Xi’s meeting with U.S. President Joe Biden.
Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images

BEIJING — U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen was scheduled to arrive in China on Thursday ahead of four full days of meetings with Chinese officials.
It’s her second trip to the country since the summer, as the U.S. and China seek to increase high-level communication in an otherwise tense relationship. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is also due to visit China again later this year.

“I think our expectation is that we will at senior levels, and increasingly at all levels, continue to have ongoing and deepening dialogue. We went for too long with too little communication, and misunderstandings developed,” Yellen told reporters ahead of her arrival in China.
Her trip will cover the southern city of Guangzhou — the capital of China’s export-heavy province of Guangdong — and the national capital of Beijing, according to a press release.
Here’s her full itinerary of meetings:

Friday, April 5 — meet with Vice Premier He Lifeng, Guangdong Governor Wang Weizhong, economic experts and AmCham China business representatives
Saturday, April 6 — continue meetings with Vice Premier He Lifeng
Sunday, April 7 — meet with Premier Li Qiang, Finance Minister Lan Fo’an, Beijing mayor Yin Yong, leading Chinese economists and Peking University students and professors
Monday, April 8 — meet with former Vice Premier Liu He, People’s Bank of China Governor Pan Gongsheng

What will they talk about?

According to the Treasury, Yellen will discuss “unfair trade practices and underscoring the global economic consequences of Chinese industrial overcapacity.”
China has faced growing global scrutiny over how the country’s emphasis on building up its manufacturing capabilities, including the use of subsidies and policy support to do so, has helped Chinese companies to sell products such as solar panels at far lower prices than manufacturers in other countries.

In March, European Union Chamber of Commerce President Jens Eskelund said trade tensions between the EU and China will likely escalate as a result.

Guangdong is by far the top province in China by value of exports, according to Wind Information.
The province exported nearly 5.4 trillion yuan ($750 billion) in manufactured products last year, with equipment accounting for two thirds, according to Tu Gaokun, director of Guangdong’s industry and information technology department.
He told reporters last week the province was “committed” to improving productivity, and noted how it aimed to build up sectors such as new energy storage, biomanufacturing and commercial aviation.

Tackling ‘illicit finance’

During her meetings in China, Yellen will also “work to expand bilateral cooperation on countering illicit finance, which can drive important progress on shared efforts against criminal activity such as drug trafficking and fraud,” the Treasury said.
It added that Yellen would discuss work on bolstering financial stability, addressing climate change and resolving debt distress in developing nations.
The trip will mark Yellen’s third meeting with Vice Premier He Lifeng, whom the Treasury secretary is also set to meet later this month at the International Monetary Fund and World Bank Group spring meetings in Washington, D.C.
He Lifeng is also director of the office of the Central Commission for Financial and Economic Affairs, a role formerly held by Liu. More

China’s real estate troubles are likely far from over and industry problems need to be addressed quickly for GDP growth to rise significantly, according to KKR.
Based on comparisons to housing corrections in the U.S., Japan and Spain, China’s “housing market correction may be just halfway complete” in terms of its depth, the report said.
China’s GDP can grow by 4.7% this year thanks to growth in new industries, while real estate and Covid-related factors account for a drag of 1.4 percentage points, the report said.

High-rise buildings are illuminated at night in the West Coast New Area of Qingdao, East China’s Shandong province, on March 22, 2024. 
Nurphoto | Nurphoto | Getty Images

BEIJING — China’s real estate troubles are likely far from over and industry problems need to be addressed quickly if overall GDP growth is to pick up significantly, according to a report released Thursday by global investment firm KKR.
That’s one of the two key takeaways from a recent trip to China by the firm’s head of global and macro asset allocation, Henry H. McVey. It was his fourth visit in just over a year.

“A fundamentally overbuilt real estate industry needs to be addressed — and quickly,” he said in the report, which counts Changchun Hua, KKR’s chief economist for Greater China, among the co-authors.
“Second, confidence must be restored to drive savings back down,” McVey said, noting that would spur consumers and businesses to spend on upgrading to higher quality products, as Chinese authorities have promoted.
Real estate and related sectors once accounted for about one fifth or more of China’s economy, depending on the breadth of analysts’ calculations. The property industry has slumped in the last few years after Beijing’s crackdown on developers’ high reliance on debt for growth.
Based on comparisons to housing corrections in the U.S., Japan and Spain, China’s “housing market correction may be just halfway complete” in terms of its depth, the KKR report said.
“Both price and volume must come under pressure to finish the cleansing cycle,” the report said. “To date, though, it has largely been a contraction in volume.”

While KKR’s report didn’t provide much detail on expectations for specific real estate policy, the authors said more action by Beijing to improve China’s real estate sector “could materially shift investor perception.”
Amid geopolitical tensions, the country’s property market slump and drop in stocks have given many foreign institutional investors pause about China investing.
“According to some of our proprietary survey work, many allocators have considered reducing China exposure to 5-6%, down from 10-12% today at a time that we think fundamentals in the economy are likely bottoming,” the KKR report said.
Much of official Chinese data to start the year beat analysts’ expectations.
Chinese officials have said the real estate sector remains in a period of adjustment, while Beijing shifts its emphasis toward manufacturing and what it considers “high-quality development.”
Authorities have also released policies to promote financial support for select property developers, while many local governments — though not necessarily the largest cities — have significantly relaxed home purchase restrictions.

Real estate’s drag to moderate

KKR expects a modest slowdown in China’s GDP growth to 4.7% this year, and 4.5% next year, with real estate and Covid-related factors halving their drag on the economy from 1.4 percentage points in 2024 to a 0.7 percentage point drag in 2025.
“Our bottom line is that: with the ongoing [property] correction as well as some potential further policy support, we think the drag to [the] overall economy should moderate a bit over the next few years,” McVey said in a separate statement. He is also chief investment officer of KKR Balance Sheet.

Catering, accommodation and wholesale are set to modestly increase their contribution to growth in the next two years, while digitalization and the shift toward more carbon-neutral, green industry are expected to remain the largest drivers of growth, according to the report.
For investors, the report said a more important development than China’s GDP increase would be whether authorities could make it easier for businesses and households to tap capital markets.
“Repairing soft spots in [the] economy, especially around housing, will ultimately improve the cost of capital, and will also allow new consumer companies to access the capital markets likely at better prices if real estate and confidence are doing better,” McVey said in the statement.
Beijing in March announced a GDP target of around 5% for this year. Minister of Housing and Urban-Rural Development Ni Hong said last month that developers should go bankrupt if necessary and that authorities would promote the development of affordable housing.
Recent data have pointed to some stabilization in the property sector slowdown. The seven-day-moving average of new home sales in 21 major cities fell by 34.5% year-on-year as of Monday, better than the 45.3% drop recorded a week earlier, according to Nomura, citing Wind Information.
Compared with the same period in 2019, that sales average was only down by 27.8% as of Monday, versus a 47% drop a week earlier, Nomura said, noting most of the improvement was in China’s biggest cities.

Consumer outlook

KKR said most of its local portfolio is in consumer and services companies, whose business reflect how Chinese people in the middle to higher income range are spending modestly to upgrade their lifestyles.
“Top line growth is solid, margins are holding, and consumers are spending on less conspicuous items such as ‘smart homes,’ pets, and recreational activities,” the report said. “Domestic travel is also strong.”
Retail sales rose by a better-than-expected 5.5% year-on-year in January and February, boosted by significant growth in Lunar New Year holiday spending.
Longer term, KKR still expects that China can follow historical precedent in changing policy to be “more investor friendly.”
“While our message is not an all-clear signal to lean in,” the report said, “it is a reminder – using history as our guide – that, if China does adjust its domestic policies to be more investor friendly (especially as it relates to supply side reforms), this market could rebound significantly from current levels.” More

Federal Reserve Bank Chair Jerome Powell speaks during the Stanford Business, Government and Society Forum at Stanford University on April 03, 2024 in Stanford, California. 
Justin Sullivan | Getty Images

Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said Wednesday it will take a while for policymakers to evaluate the current state of inflation, keeping the timing of potential interest rate cuts uncertain.
Speaking specifically about stronger-than-expected price pressures to start the year, the central bank leader said he and his fellow officials are in no rush to ease monetary policy.

“On inflation, it is too soon to say whether the recent readings represent more than just a bump,” Powell said in remarks ahead of a question-and-answer session at Stanford University.
“We do not expect that it will be appropriate to lower our policy rate until we have greater confidence that inflation is moving sustainably down toward 2 percent,” he added. “Given the strength of the economy and progress on inflation so far, we have time to let the incoming data guide our decisions on policy.”
The remarks come two weeks after the rate-setting Federal Open Market Committee again voted to hold benchmark short-term borrowing rates steady. In addition, the committee’s post-meeting statement on March 20 included the “greater confidence” qualifier needed before cutting.

‘Bumpy path’

Markets widely expect the FOMC to start easing policy this year, though they have had to recalibrate their outlook for the timing and extent of cuts as inflation has held stubbornly higher. Other economic variables, particularly in the labor market and consumer spending, have held up as well, giving the Fed time to assess the current state of affairs before moving.
The Fed’s preferred inflation measure, the personal consumption expenditures price index, showed a 12-month rate of 2.5% for February, or 2.8% for the pivotal core measure that excludes food and energy. Virtually all other inflation gauges show rates in excess of 3%.

“Recent readings on both job gains and inflation have come in higher than expected,” Powell said. “The recent data do not, however, materially change the overall picture, which continues to be one of solid growth, a strong but rebalancing labor market, and inflation moving down toward 2 percent on a sometimes bumpy path.”
Other Fed officials speaking this week have made remarks consistent with the Fed’s patient approach.
Atlanta Fed President Raphael Bostic told CNBC on Wednesday that he thinks just one cut might be in the offing as prices of some important items have turned higher. San Francisco Fed President Mary Daly said three cuts is a “reasonable baseline” but noted there are no guarantees, while Cleveland’s Loretta Mester also said cuts are likely later this year while adding that rates over the longer term may be higher than anticipated. All three are FOMC voters.
Powell reiterated that decisions are being made “meeting by meeting” and noted only that cuts are “likely to be appropriate … at some point this year.”
The uncertainty about rates has caused some consternation in markets, with stocks falling sharply earlier this week as Treasury yields moved higher. The market stabilized Wednesday, but traders in the fed funds futures market again repriced their rate expectations, casting some doubt on a June cut as the market-implied probability moved to about 54% at one point, according to CME Group data.

Election ahead

Along with his comments on rates, Powell spent some time discussing Fed independence.
With the presidential election campaign heating up, Powell noted the importance of steering clear of political issues.
“Our analysis is free from any personal or political bias, in service to the public,” he said. “We will not always get it right — no one does. But our decisions will always reflect our painstaking assessment of what is best for our economy in the medium and longer term — and nothing else.”
He also talked about “mission creep,” specifically as it relates to some demand for the Fed to get involved in climate change issues and the preparations financial institutions take for related events.
“We are not, nor do we seek to be, climate policymakers,” he said.
Correction: Powell’s remarks come two weeks after the Federal Open Market Committee again voted to hold rates steady. An earlier version misstated the timing. Raphael Bostic is president of the Atlanta Fed. An earlier version misstated the city.

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Source: Finance – cnbc.com More