Minneapolis Fed President Says He Doesn’t Expect a Recession This Year

Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank President Neel Kashkari on Wednesday said he does not expect the U.S. economy to slip into recession this year, but rather to grow at a moderate rate.

The Fed raised interest-rates by a quarter of a percent in December, but has left them at between 0.25 percent to 0.5 percent ever since. Low interest rates are aimed at encouraging investment and hiring.

As long as inflation stays low, Kashkari said at a town hall in Rochester, Minneapolis, the Fed should try to keep putting more Americans back to work. The Fed will not raise rates again until “the data allows it,” he said, without saying what data he would need to see to support a rate hike.

Kashkari, the Fed’s newest policymaker, is not a voter on monetary policy this year, and his views on the economic outlook and interest-rate policy are not well known.

Since he began his job in January, he has focused most of his effort on floating new ideas for preventing future bank bailouts of the kind that he ran for the Treasury after the financial crisis.

On Wednesday, he said that the Fed’s giant bond-buying programs were the right thing to do after the financial crisis, but that they were neither the complete nor the perfect response.

via Reuters

Content is for general information purposes only. It is not investment advice or a solution to buy or sell securities. Opinions are the authors; not necessarily that of OANDA Business Information & Services, Inc. or any of its affiliates, subsidiaries, officers or directors. If you would like to reproduce or redistribute any of the content found on MarketPulse, an award winning forex, commodities and global indices analysis and news site service produced by OANDA Business Information & Services, Inc., please access the RSS feed or contact us at info@marketpulse.com. Visit https://www.marketpulse.com/ to find out more about the beat of the global markets. © 2023 OANDA Business Information & Services Inc.