With employers hiring, consumers spending and companies raising some prices, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell is embarking on a high-stakes gamble.
WASHINGTON — With employers hiring, consumers spending and companies raising some prices, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell is embarking on a high-stakes gamble. Powell’s bet is that the Fed can keep rates ultra-low even as the U.S. economic recovery kicks into high gear — and that it won’t have to quickly raise rates to stop runaway inflation. It’s just the kind of gamble that in the past led some of Powell’s predecessors to miscalculate and inadvertently derail the economy. Powell and the rest of the Fed’s policymaking committee plan to keep rates near zero until nearly everyone who wants a job has one, even after inflation has crept above their 2% annual target level. Faster growth raises the risk that the Fed will eventually have to respond quickly and aggressively to a sudden acceleration of prices — and potentially cause a slump, even another recession. Getting the timing right on interest rate policy is a tricky task that has bedeviled Fed chairs for decades. Arthur Burns, who led the central bank in the 1970s, is widely blamed for allowing inflation to get out of hand after yielding to pressure from President Richard Nixon to forgo further rate hikes. Critics also argue that Alan Greenspan, whose long tenure as Fed chair ended in 2006, failed to lift rates quickly or sharply enough to prevent the housing bubble that ignited the 2008 financial crisis and the Great Recession.
