US Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell on Tuesday said that officials should weigh removing COVID-19 pandemic support at a faster pace and he retired the word “transitory” to describe stubbornly high inflation, although a new COVID-19 strain remains a risk.
His comments before the US Senate Committee on Banking, where both Democrats and Republicans expressed concerns about high prices, were taken as a hawkish pivot by financial markets that could deliver a sooner-than-expected increase in interest rates next year.
“It is appropriate, I think, for us to discuss at our next meeting, which is in a couple of weeks, whether it will be appropriate to wrap up our purchases a few months earlier,” Powell said in response to a question about the central bank’s bond buying.
Photo: EPA-EFE
“In those two weeks we are going to get more data and learn more about the new variant,” he added.
The Fed is scheduled to complete its asset-purchase program in the middle of next year under a plan announced at the start of last month.
The next gathering of the policy-setting Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) is on Dec. 14 and Dec. 15, where it could make a decision to accelerate the tapering.
Powell’s comments mark a rare moment of pre-positioning by a Fed chair, which signifies he probably already has broad support on the FOMC to cut back asset purchases.
Policymakers, including Fed Governor Christopher Waller, and Fed presidents Mary Daly of San Francisco and Raphael Bostic of Atlanta, have all said they would consider a faster pace of tapering if economic data remained strong.
The bipartisan support during the hearing for more forceful action on inflation also gave Powell political backing to speed up the taper prior to a vote on his second term as Fed chair.
The comments also mark an unusual pivot in his tenure — after the FOMC set the current pace of tapering less than six weeks ago.
This suggests rising uncertainty inside the Fed about the “transitory” nature of current prices increases.
Indeed, Powell said “it’s a good time to retire that word.”
“Most forecasters, including at the Fed, continue to expect that inflation will move down significantly over the next year as supply and demand imbalances abate,” he said.
“It is difficult to predict the persistence and effects of supply constraints, but it now appears that factors pushing inflation upward will linger well into next year,” he added.
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],”
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
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained