While the Federal Reserve has a new chairman for the first time in nearly two decades, it is not likely to change the direction the central bank has pushed interest rates since June 2004.
Economists widely believe that Ben Bernanke will take over where his predecessor Alan Greenspan left off -- boosting interest rates at the conclusion of yesterday's meeting, again by one-quarter of a percentage point.
They said the more important information to come from the deliberations would be any possible change in the wording of the Fed's statement, providing clues about where rates will go in the future.
"The real question is not what he does, but what he says," said David Wyss, chief economist at Standard & Poor's in New York.
The rate-raising campaign started nearly two years ago under Greenspan. Since then, the Fed has pushed the federal funds rate, the interest that banks charge each other on overnight loans, from a 46-year low of 1 percent to the current level of 4.5 percent. In all, there were 14 increases, each by one-quarter of a percentage point.
They have pushed banks' prime lending rate, the benchmark for millions of consumer and business loans, from 4 percent to 7.5 percent before yesterday's meeting.
The expected 15th rate increase would leave the funds rate at a five-year high of 4.75 percent; commercial banks would be expected to respond by pushing the prime rate up to 7.75 percent.
Analysts are split on what will happen after this meeting.
Many believe the Fed will boost rates one more time, to 5 percent, at the next meeting on May 10 and then move to the sidelines for the rest of the year.
Economists who hold this view believe that Fed officials will decide to take a breather because they are seeing signs the previous increases are beginning to have the desired effect: slowing economic growth just enough to ensure inflation does not get out of hand.
This impact is most evident in the formerly red-hot housing market. Sales of existing homes have fallen in five of the past six months and sales of new homes dropped last month by the largest amount in nearly nine years.
Lyle Gramley, a former Fed board member and now an economic adviser with Schwab Washington Research Group, said he believed the central bank would keep lifting rates until there were definite signs the economy was slowing.
"A combination of a downturn in housing and a slowdown of consumer spending should do the trick, but the Fed does not know for sure right now whether that will occur," Gramley said.
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