The Federal Reserve lowered interest rates for the first time since the 2008 financial crisis, a move designed to preserve economic growth threatened by a volatile trade war and global upheaval, including Great Britain’s break-up with the European Union.
The reduction of 25 basis points takes the benchmark federal funds rate to a range of 2% to 2.25% and ends a string of nine increases since 2015, a move that had been eagerly anticipated in financial markets.
“Weak global growth and trade tensions are having an effect on the U.S. economy,” Fed Chairman Jerome Powell said in a news briefing after the the central bank’s monetary policy committee concluded a two-day meeting. “With trade, it is a factor that we have to assess in a new way.”
The Fed indicated in June that its next change to interest rates would probably be a cut, a signal that the chairman underscored in testimony on Capitol Hill earlier this month when he cited a range of challenges that countered strong consumer confidence and low unemployment. Speculation on a reduction as large as 50 basis points, which some Wall Street economists believed was the most likely option, waxed and waned afterward.
“The Fed has embraced the idea of ‘insurance cuts’ — take preventive measures and cut rates in the face of high uncertainties and a cloudy outlook,” said Michelle Meyer, an economist with Bank of America, which had forecast the monetary policy committee would make the choice it did.
The reduction marks a public win for President Trump, who has been pushing the central bank to lower interest rates and berating both it and Powell via his Twitter feed, which has 62 million followers.
“I’d like to see a large cut,” Trump told reporters Tuesday. Additionally, he said, the central bank should immediately stop paring a balance sheet that ballooned to $4.5 trillion as the Fed purchased government debt and mortgage-backed securities to amplify the benefits of near-zero interest rates during a plodding recovery from the 2008 financial crisis.
While Republican lawmakers lambasted the so-called quantitative easing program in the waning years of the Obama administration, Trump says reversing it and raising interest at the same time undermined his efforts in the White House.
“The Fed moved, in my opinion, far too early and far too severely,” he said Tuesday. “It puts me at somewhat of a disadvantage. Fortunately, I’ve made the economy so strong that nothing’s going to stop us.”
Both GOP-led tax cuts and Trump’s loosening of federal regulations have buoyed business growth, economists say, but the trade war that has become a cornerstone of his first term has softened it — and is among the reasons the Fed’s monetary policy committee cited for lowering rates.
Trump’s tariffs on $250 billion in Chinese imports have driven up consumer prices, eroding corporate profits, and his threats of levies on items from French wines to Indian and Vietnamese goods as well as automobiles have left executives wary of investing money in new products and factories.
Brexit, the withdrawal from the EU that British voters approved three years ago, presents additional challenges, Powell has said. The country is the world’s fifth-largest economy, and how leaving the EU without a trade deal in place would affect it is unclear.
The committee also said Wednesday it would end the balance-sheet runoff this month rather than in September, as it had previously planned, though Powell reiterated that the central bank never takes political considerations into account in its decisions.
“Nor do we conduct monetary policy in order to prove our independence,” he added. “We conduct monetary policy to move as close as possible to our statutory goals” of maximizing employment and fostering stable economic growth, Powell said.
While the reduction should buoy business confidence, the chairman said, it’s not necessarily the start of a long series of cuts in interest rates.
Indeed, Powell’s remarks suggest the Fed views cuts now as temporary, much like changes in the mid-1990s, Joseph Song, an economist with Bank of America, told the Washington Examiner.
Starting in 1995, the central bank under Alan Greenspan took the benchmark rate from 6% to a low of 4.75% before raising it to 6.5% in President Clinton’s last year in office. It wasn’t until George W. Bush took office in 2001 that the Fed began a two-year cutting cycle that encompassed an economic shock from the 9/11 terrorist attacks and took rates to a low of 1%.
Committee members appear to be calculating that adjusting interest rates now will sustain current economic strength long enough that they can eventually take them back to 2.5% and move even higher, gaining more latitude to counter any future recession, Song explained.
In the interim, the reduction is unlikely to unleash a flurry of consumer spending, said Greg McBridge, chief financial analyst for Bankrate.com.
A poll conducted by the company showed that the “the vast majority of Americans say they won’t borrow more, invest more, or save more in response to lower rates, he added.
