A majority of US Federal Reserve officials last month said that economic conditions would likely warrant keeping the Fed’s benchmark policy unchanged for the rest of this year.
Several officials said their view could shift in either direction based on incoming data, according to minutes of the meeting released on Wednesday.
Weaker growth and lower inflation expectations could prompt the Fed to cut rates, while faster growth and rising inflation expectations could prompt it to resume raising rates.
The Fed at its meeting on March 19 and 20 left its key policy rate unchanged and trimmed its rate hikes outlook this year from two to none.
Some economists said that the Fed could actually start cutting rates later this year if the economy slows further.
US President Donald Trump said last week that he wanted the Fed to start cutting rates.
Lawrence Kudlow, head of the US National Economic Council, said he favored reducing the Fed’s current rate by 0.5 percentage points to reverse mistakes the central bank made last year by boosting the rate too much.
The Fed last year hiked its policy rate four times, leaving it in December last year at a level of 2.25 percent to 2.5 percent.
Trump criticized those rate hikes, blaming them for a plunge in the stock market late last year. He also has said the increases were unnecessary because inflation was tame even though unemployment had dropped to near a 50-year low.
Trump recently announced his intention to nominate two political allies, 2012 presidential candidate Herman Cain and political commentator Stephen Moore, for two vacancies on the seven-member Fed board.
The minutes, released with the customary three-week lag since the meeting, showed that Fed officials spent time discussing a slowdown in the economy that occurred late last year and carried into the early part of this year.
The minutes said that Fed officials believe “the recent softness likely reflected temporary factors” such as the federal government’s 35-day partial shutdown and the sharp drop in the stock market in December.
Fed officials said that consumer sentiment has improved since then and officials expect consumer spending to rebound in the next few months.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day