Federal Reserve officials discussed the possibility of moving the US central bank to a “restrictive” policy stance that would better fight inflation through more aggressive interest rate increases, but worried that this could undermine the strong recovery in the jobs market.
According to minutes of the most recent Federal Open Market Committee meeting held in early May, most US monetary policymakers agreed on the need to keep increasing the Fed’s main interest rate — set at a range of between 0.75 per cent and 1 per cent — by 50 basis points “at the next couple of meetings”.
This would match the Fed’s goal of “expeditiously” getting interest rates back up to a neutral setting, where it is neither boosting nor stunting the economy.