The minutes from the Federal Reserve’s last policy meeting are expected on Wednesday to detail the breadth of debate at the U.S. central bank over how much further interest rates may need to rise to slow inflation and cool an economy that has remained stronger than expected despite monetary tightening.
The Jan. 31-Feb. 1 meeting ended with the Fed raising its benchmark overnight interest rate by a quarter of a percentage point, a return to a more standard rate-hike size after a year of sequential 75-basis-point and half-percentage-point increases.
In a news conference following the end of that meeting, Fed Chair Jerome Powell said the return to smaller rate hikes would allow a more stepwise hunt for a possible stopping point, and that officials spent the session “talking quite a bit about the path forward” as the central bank nears what may be the end of its hiking cycle.
But that session was also held before key data releases that showed unusually strong job gains in January, and less of a slowdown in inflation than anticipated – a trend expected to continue this week with the release on Friday of a report on how the Fed’s preferred inflation index fared in January.
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