With a resilient job market and consumer spending raising hopes the U.S. economy will achieve a “soft landing,” a top Cambridge Trust banker sees that there remains a risk the Federal Reserve will take its interest rate hikes too far, leading to recession.
The Federal Reserve’s decision to hold rates steady signals that central bankers believe it is time to hit pause, at least temporarily, on their aggressive campaign to tame runaway inflation.
To solve our biggest problems, housing costs chief among them, businesses need interest rate certainty, not threats of beating the American worker into submission with rate hikes. Jerome Powell and the FOMC are now doing more harm than good.
Leading Federal Reserve officials are sending out stronger signals that they will forego an interest rate increase at the central bank’s next meeting in June, though they indicate hikes could resume later this year.
Surging prices for gas, food and rent catapulted U.S. inflation to a new four-decade peak in June, further pressuring households and likely sealing the case for another large interest rate hike by the Federal Reserve, with higher borrowing costs to follow.
Bank certificate of deposit rates in Massachusetts continue to tick up, many now well past 2 percent.
With three rate hikes in 2017 and another three – or maybe four – expected this year, competition in the government banking sector is starting to heat up. Rates are rising and new players all over the state are getting into the space to try to get a piece of the action.
Traders of U.S. short-term interest-rate futures continued to bet the Federal Reserve would raise interest rates just two times this year after a U.S. government report showed employers added fewer jobs than expected in December, even as wages picked up.
The U.S. Federal Reserve has now met its employment goal and is nearing its inflation goal, despite some weak recent economic data, so it should continue raising interest rates, Cleveland Fed President Loretta Mester said on Monday.
