The Federal Reserve will offer new insight Wednesday into how policymakers reached one of their most difficult decisions in years, shrugging off bank failures that roiled markets last month to deliver a quarter-percentage-point rate hike amid signs of stubborn price pressures.
The Fed's rate increase last month, which brought their benchmark rate to a range of 4.75%-5%, had a "very strong consensus" among committee members, Chair Jerome Powell told reporters in a press conference following the March 21-22 Federal Open Market Committee meeting. All eyes will be on the minutes from that gathering, set to be released Wednesday at 2 p.m. in Washington, for details about the debate.
"The overall message should still be that there's a lot of uncertainty, but we know that we have an inflation problem still — that will be number one," said Citigroup economist Veronica Clark.
Weighing Trade-offs
The March rate hike came at a tumultuous time: Silicon Valley Bank had collapsed less than two weeks earlier, and Fed officials were unsure how widespread the banking turmoil would be. With inflation still running much higher than the Fed's 2% target, officials increased rates, but not by as much as some Fed watchers had thought they might before the bank troubles unfolded.
Data released earlier on Wednesday showed a key measure of US inflation hinting at a moderation last month. The March core consumer price index — which excludes food and energy and is closely watched by the Fed — rose 0.4% from the prior month following a 0.5% gain, in line with economists' estimates.
Analysts will be looking to the minutes for insight into how policymakers weighed the need to further tighten to bring down inflation against the possibility of exacerbating angst in financial markets.
A key question, raised by Powell after the meeting and many of his colleagues in the weeks since, is the extent to which tighter lending conditions will filter through to the economy as the Fed tries to cool inflation and the labor market.
Future policy
The unpredictability of that has left economists and market participants scratching their heads about what the path of Fed policy could look like going forward.
Fed officials in March removed language from their post-meeting statement that said that "ongoing" increases in the policy rate would be appropriate, saying instead that "some" additional tightening may be warranted. They also estimated that interest rates would rise to 5.1% by year-end, according to their median forecast, implying one more quarter-point move.
With policy now being conducted much more on a meeting-by-meeting basis, investors will look to the minutes for signs of how many officials may support further hikes.
"Things have changed, we've gotten some stability in markets and volatility has come off a bit, but how is the base case evolving," said Brett Ryan, senior US economist at Deutsche Bank. "It's really important to see how much, in terms of upside risks to rate hikes going forward, did this latest episode truncate those upside risks."
Bank fallout
The minutes from the Fed's March meeting will also provide an important glimpse into how the country's top banking regulators viewed the financial stability risks stemming from the bank collapses and their fallout.
Minutes from their previous meeting, at the beginning of February, showed that some of the problems that led to SVB's failure, namely unrealized losses in their Treasury holdings, were discussed as a potential risk to the financial sector.
Powell, at the post-meeting press conference in March, said officials were stumped by the rapid run on SVB. And New York Fed President John Williams this week said he didn't think there was a link between the Fed's aggressive rate increases and stress in the banking sector.
A lending pullback could help the Fed in its attempt to cool inflation, though it's unclear exactly how much and for how long tighter credit conditions will impact the economy.
"They're kind of increasingly confident that they've avoided a crisis, so it seems to me if they were willing to carry forward at that time, then all else equal they'd probably be more willing to carry forward today, depending of course on whether it's necessary or not," said Stephen Stanley, chief US economist at Santander US Capital Markets.
—With assistance from Jonnelle Marte.
