Despite pressure, Powell stays the course

Jerome Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve, on Tuesday defended the central bank’s wait-and-see approach to cutting interest rates, in the face of intense pressure from President Donald Trump to follow central banks around the world that have acted faster.

- ESHE NELSON COLBY SMITH

Decisions will depend on incoming data, Mr Powell said at the European Central Bank’s annual conference in Sintra, Portugal. He did not give hints on the timing of rate cuts, other than to say most members of the Fed’s rate-setting committee expected them to come sometime this year.

“We are going meeting-by-meeting,” Mr Powell said. “I wouldn't take any meeting off the table or put it directly on the table. It's going to depend how the data evolve.”

This year, central banks across the world have diverged on the speed and magnitude of their interest rate cuts as inflation has slowed globally. But top policymakers who gathered Tuesday for a panel discussion in Portugal agreed that extreme uncertainty about the economic outlook, stemming partly from Trump's policies, had made signalling policy decisions more difficult.

“We are facing geopolitical developments that are worrying generally, but that also are causing two sides of risk to inflation,” Christine Lagarde, the president of the European Central Bank, said in the panel discussion. “So we have to continue to be extremely vigilant.”

Policymakers have said the world has become more unpredictable, making forecasting inflation and setting interest rates more challenging. One major source of uncertainty is how high Trump will set tariffs for many countries and how that could rewrite global supply chains.