FOMC Commentary – July 31, 2024
By Chief Economist, Jeanette Garretty The statement released at the end of the FOMC meeting today was predictable and, quite frankly, a bit boring. The Fed Funds target rate (aka, “the policy target”) was left unchanged at 5.25-5.5%, and the usual “data-driven” waiting-and-seeing language was included. The one notable aspect of the statement was the clear […]
FOMC Commentary – June 12, 2024
By Chief Economist, Jeanette Garretty June 12, 2024 Chairman Powell has a problem. He won’t forecast. He is prepared to act on interest rates more quickly “if the labor markets deteriorate unexpectedly” while at the same time acknowledging that if he waits to see that, it’s likely to be too late (monetary policy has an […]
3 Questions with Robertson Stephens feat. Jeanette Garretty
May 7, 2024 – CMO, Louis Calabrese, hosts Chief Economist Jeanette Garretty to discuss the most recent FOMC meeting and her outlook on the U.S. economy.
FOMC Commentary – May 1, 2024
By Chief Economist, Jeanette Garretty May 2, 2024There is very little that was surprising in the May 1 interest rate announcement by the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC). It was acknowledged by a number of Federal Reserve members weeks ago that progress toward the 2% inflation target slowed in the first quarter; the FOMC statement reiterated […]
The Problem with Productivity
April 2, 2024 By Jeanette Garretty, Chief Economist Productivity isn’t everything, but in the long run it is almost everything. A country’s ability to improve its standard of living over time depends almost entirely on its ability to raise its output per worker. –Paul Krugman, The Age of Diminishing Expectations (1994) Every five or six […]
FOMC Commentary – March 20, 2024
March 20, 2024 What Just Happened? By Chief Economist, Jeanette Garretty The just-concluded March meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) ended with an unsurprising statement leaving the target Fed Funds at 5.25%-5.5% and citing a need for more data on inflation before initiating a series of interest rate cuts. The accompanying Summary of […]
FOMC Commentary – January 31, 2024
By Chief Economist, Jeanette Garretty The FOMC statement released today is, in its language, quite benign. Notably, any language indicating a bias towards hiking interest rates (should inflation pressures return and/or inflation fail to continue to decelerate) has been removed from the statement. Overall, the message of the statement is that the Fed does not […]
Q4 2023 Economic Commentary
By Jeanette Garretty, Chief Economist The fourth and final quarter of 2023 saw a resolution of a number of important questions: Would inflation decelerate as hoped? Would the US economy falter? Would the Federal Reserve ever stop raising interest rates? These three questions dominated investor sentiment for much of 2023 and, in keeping with economics being […]
Jeanette Garretty on Bloomberg Daybreak Australia
January 7, 2024 – Chief Economist and Managing Director, Jeanette Garretty appeared on Bloomberg Daybreak Australia to discuss her key takeaways from the US jobs data and outlook for the US economy. “The jobs report was a good jobs report,” says Garretty. “The wage growth was a little bit hotter than expected, but the Fed has said all along […]
Jeanette Garretty on Yahoo! Finance
December 27, 2024 – Chief Economist and Managing Director, Jeanette Garretty appeared on Yahoo! Finance to discuss holiday retail sales. “The Trends seen in recent consumer spending patterns and the data that may serve as a ‘check engine light’ in 2024,” says Garretty. “There is very little… economic evidence that consumer sentiment directly feeds into those near-term spending patterns […]
Jeanette Garretty on Bloomberg Radio
December 21, 2024 – Chief Economist and Managing Director, Jeanette Garretty appeared on Bloomberg Daybreak Asia to discuss the US economic outlook. “I think it’s a point that we have long wanted to be at a point of actually greater certainty about what the outlook is for basic economic conditions,” says Garretty. “But there is a third inflection point going […]
FOMC Commentary – December 13, 2023
By Chief Economist, Jeanette Garretty The FOMC statement released today confirmed the intention to keep interest rates unchanged—and, somewhat surprisingly—provided subtle, important support for the current discussion in financial markets about interest rate cuts in 2024. “Cuts” in the plural; the Summary of Economic Projections (“SEP”) released in conjunction with the FOMC statement indicated at […]