Jackson Hole Symposium

Fed seen cutting interest rates two or three times this year and then pausing The U.S. economy is not expected to fall into recession, experts attending the Federal Reserve's summer retreat at the base of the Grand Teton Mountains in Wyoming say. "The underpinnings of the economy look good. Broadly speaking, things look pretty solid," said Karen Dynan, an economics professor at Harvard University. "When we enter the typical recession, there is usually some underlying weakness. It just doesn't feel that way now," she added. Worries ...

Now that Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell has made it crystal clear that interest-rate cuts are coming next month, bond traders are focusing in on bets over the size of that first reduction and the future path of easing. Powell, speaking Friday at the US central bank’s annual symposium in Wyoming, said the “time has come” for the Fed to lower benchmark rates from their two-decade high, his clearest signal yet that long-awaited rate cuts are imminent. While the Fed chair gave no indication on the size of cuts or the path of easing, ...

Officials from three of the world’s major central banks on Friday signaled they are firmly on course to lower — or continue lowering — interest rates in the coming months, marking the beginning of the end for an era of high borrowing costs as the global economy slips out of the grip of post-Covid inflation. “The time has come for policy to adjust,” Fed Chair Jerome Powell told an annual gathering of global policymakers and economists in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, all but committing the US central bank to lowering rates when officials ...

The U.S. Federal Reserve's dovish shift will likely give the Bank of Japan some respite in its battle to tame a weak yen, but could complicate its efforts to raise interest rates if the two central banks' diverging policy paths keep markets jittery. At an annual symposium in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, Fed Chair Jerome Powell said on Friday "the time has come" to cut rates as rising risks to the job market left no room for further weakness, offering an explicit endorsement of an imminent policy easing. The remarks came hours after BOJ ...

European Central Bank Governing Council member Robert Holzmann warned that interest rates won’t necessarily be lowered next month — despite several of his colleagues signaling a cut. “As always, I keep my reservations until the day of decision, and we’ll have a number of data coming in,” the hawkish Austrian central bank chief said at the Federal Reserve’s annual conference in Jackson Hole. “So I wouldn’t say it is a foregone conclusion — definitely some of my colleagues are thinking this,” he told Bloomberg Television on Friday. “I ...

There are some strong comments coming through from Chair Powell at his Jackson Hole speech. We get the usual bits and pieces about inflation looking better and the focus is now much more on jobs, but he is as categorical as he can be with the statement "The time has come for policy to adjust. The direction of travel is clear". This follows on from the minutes to the July FOMC meeting, released on Wednesday, that said “the vast majority [of FOMC members] observed that, if the data continued to come in about as expected, it would ...