Fed’s Yellen Confident on 2015 Rate Hike

Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen has made clear that she expects US interest rates to be raised from their current record low before the end of the year.

In an extensive 40-page speech Yellen set out the case for raising rates – for the first since 2006 – as she expects inflation will gradually move up to the Fed’s target rate of 2% as the unusually low oil price rises and strong dollar weakens.

“I anticipate that it will likely be appropriate to raise the target range for the federal funds rate sometime later this year and to continue boosting short-term rates at a gradual pace thereafter as the labor market improves further and inflation moves back to our 2% objective,” she said during a speech in Amherst, Massachusetts, on Thursday.

Her comments come just a week after Fed policymakers voted to keep interest rates at near-zero – where they have been since the 2008 financial crisis – and she warned that the US economy was not yet strong enough to withstand “recent global economic and financial developments” following a worldwide markets slump due to concerns about the health of the Chinese economy.

Via The Guardian

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Alfonso Esparza

Alfonso Esparza

Senior Currency Analyst at Market Pulse
Alfonso Esparza specializes in macro forex strategies for North American and major currency pairs. Upon joining OANDA in 2007, Alfonso Esparza established the MarketPulseFX blog and he has since written extensively about central banks and global economic and political trends. Alfonso has also worked as a professional currency trader focused on North America and emerging markets. He has been published by The MarketWatch, Reuters, the Wall Street Journal and The Globe and Mail, and he also appears regularly as a guest commentator on networks including Bloomberg and BNN. He holds a finance degree from the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education (ITESM) and an MBA with a specialization on financial engineering and marketing from the University of Toronto.
Alfonso Esparza