The two biggest U.S. banks raised their forecasts of how quickly the Federal Reserve will raise interest rates this year, with Bank of America Corp. predicting a move at every meeting to tackle the highest inflation in four decades.
“We now look for seven 25 basis point hikes this year and a peak funds rate of 2.75%-3.00%,” economists led by Ethan Harris wrote in a note Friday to clients. “This should affect the economy with a lag, weighing on 2023 growth.”
JPMorgan Chase & Co. separately lifted its call to five hikes in 2022 from four previously. Chief U.S. Economist Michael Feroli said Fed Chair Jerome Powell’s remarks following Wednesday’s meeting “were clearly intended to dissuade the market from expecting a quarterly tempo of rate hikes.”
Powell told reporters that officials were ready to raise rates in March and he left the door open to moving at every meeting if needed to curb the fastest inflation in a generation. “There’s a risk that the high inflation we’re seeing will be prolonged, there’s a risk that it will move even higher. We have to be in a position with our monetary policy to address all of those plausible outcomes,” he said.
Minneapolis Fed President Neel Kashkari told National Public Radio in an interview Friday that “we just don’t know” if the three rate hikes signaled by the Fed in its last quarterly forecasts — released in December — would be enough to get inflation in check. “It is going to depend on supply chains. What happens to workers,” he said.
The Fed initially expected price pressures to ease as pandemic-related supply chain issued were resolved but has more recently conceded that it’s taking longer than anticipated.
Data released on Friday showed that the personal consumption expenditures price gauge — the Fed’s preferred gauge of price pressures — rose 0.4% from a month earlier and 5.8% from December 2020, the most since 1982. A separate report showed employment costs rose in 2021 by the most in two decades.
