The Federal Open Market Committee on Wednesday released minutes from its Jan. 26-27 policy meeting.
With the economy continuing to shake off the effects from the Covid-19 pandemic, the committee, which sets monetary policy for the Federal Reserve, kept policy unchanged.
That meant holding benchmark short-term borrowing rates near zero and maintaining the minimum $120 billion of asset purchases each month.
Heading into the meeting, investors had been looking for discussion about when the FOMC might start tapering the pace of its bond buying, or quantitative easing. The post-meeting statement made no mention of the talks, and Fed Chairman Jerome Powell said afterwards that the Fed likely would keep policy accommodative.
The statement did note that the speed of economic activity and improvements in the labor market has “moderated in recent months.”
Since the meeting, Fed officials have been virtually unanimous in saying they don’t expect significant policy changes until more progress is made towards the central bank’s “broad and inclusive” goal for the labor market. Powell and others have stressed that they won’t start raising interest rates to head off inflation, but rather will wait for actual price pressures to show up before tightening policy.
“In terms of tapering, it’s just premature. We just created the guidance. We said we wanted to see substantial further progress toward our goals before we modify our asset purchase guidance,” Powell said at his post-meeting news conference.
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