Powell is scheduled to hold a press conference at 2:30 p.m.Trump isn’t making the Fed’s tricky task any easier. Aside from criticizing recent Fed rate hikes, he’s launched a trade war with China that threatens both to slow growth and boost inflation. While they raised projections for expansion this year and next, they predicted that growth would slow to 1.8 per cent by 2021. Powell has repeatedly played down the importance of neutral given economists’ inability to know precisely where it lies.Moreover, policy makers haven’t agreed on what they should do when rates reach neutral. The median long-run neutral estimate moved up slightly to 3 per cent from 2.9 per cent.The Fed’s hike widens a gap with its peers elsewhere.

Source: Economic Times September 26, 2018 18:05 UTC