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Top Fed Official Warns of Necessity for Further Interest Rate Increases

by Michael Nguyen
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Someone from the Federal Reserve, Christopher Waller, said on Friday that it hasn’t been easy for a year now to get prices under control. He thinks interest rates should go up more in order to make inflation better, although he didn’t say how much. According to him, inflation (which is when things cost too much money) is still very high so his job is not finished yet.

Last month, prices went down on a lot of food and gas but the overall prices, or the “core” ones, kept getting higher. In fact, they’re now 5.6% higher than they were just one year ago. And according to Mr Waller’s comments, this has been happening since December 2021. Even though this is happening, the Fed’s staff economists predicted a “mild recession” sometime soon.

Mr. Waller is seeing if two big banks’ collapse last month will make other banks reduce their lending, which could slow the economy down. It’s not sure how much it’ll affect us yet, however people are still getting jobs and prices of things keep rising faster than what the Federal Reserve thinks they should – so they have to make money more expensive.

The Federal Reserve Chairman, while speaking in San Antonio, Texas, said that they believe it’s necessary to increase the interest rate. This would make the rate higher than in the last 16 years. It will reach around 5.1%.

The Federal Reserve’s boss, Waller, wants to keep the main rate high for much longer than expected. According to a special tool called CME Fedwatch, traders predict that this main rate would go up one more time in May and then drop three times before we reach the end of the year. This prediction is likely influenced by the assumption that our economy may have a recession forcing the Fed to reduce their rates.

Waller said that because inflation isn’t happening as quickly as expected, we must keep our current spending policies for a long period of time – longer than most of us think.

Waller is hopeful after seeing something special in Wednesday’s inflation news. This news showed that rents have finally stopped increasing so quickly and there are lots of new apartments being built. With all these extra apartments, vacancy levels have gone up, which means landlords have to lower the rent when they make a new lease.

Mr. Waller said that as these trends continue, the prices charged by the government to rent things will decrease. This will cause the inflation rate (which measures how quickly prices are increasing) to end 2018 at around 3%-3.5%.

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