Federal Reserve press conference, 2019-09-18 — Chair Jerome Powell

Question (Richard Miller, Bloomberg): [Inaudible remark] I’m sorry. Rich Miller with Bloomberg. Taking the statement, your opening remarks, and the SEP, I’m just wondering what kind of message we should take from this. Do you still—does the FOMC—is it safe to say the FOMC still has an easing bias or not?
Answer: So the idea of having a bias is something that was a longtime practice, and we don’t actually have that practice anymore, so I can’t really adopt it right here. But, nonetheless, I’ll respond to your question. So we did—we made one decision today, and that decision was to lower the federal funds rate by ¼ percentage point. We believe that action is appropriate to promote our objectives, of course. We’re going to be highly data dependent, as always. Our decisions are going to depend on the implications of incoming information for the outlook, and I would also say, as we often do, that we’re not on a preset course. So that’s how we’re going to look at it. We’re going to be carefully looking at economic data. Sometimes the path ahead is clear and sometimes less so. So we’re going to be looking carefully, meeting by meeting, at the full range of information, and we’re going to assess the appropriate stance of policy as we go. And, as I said, we will act as appropriate to sustain the expansion.

Question (Richard Miller, Bloomberg): If I could just follow up, you’ve also said that the favorable outlook is predicated on financial conditions, and the financial conditions are in turn predicated on an outlook for Fed policy—in this case, further cuts. Wouldn’t that suggest that you should be inclined to—if you want those financial conditions and that favorable outlook to come about, you should be inclined to cut?
Answer: Well, what we do going forward is very much going to depend, Rich, on the flow of data and information. We’ve seen—you know, if you look at the things we’re monitoring, particularly global growth and trade developments, global growth has continued to weaken. I think it’s weakened since our last meeting. Trade developments have been up and down and then up, I guess—or back up, perhaps—over the course of this intermeeting period. In any case, they’ve been quite volatile. So we do see those risks as actually more heightened now. We’re going to be watching that carefully. We’re also going to be watching the U.S. data quite carefully, and we’ll have to make an assessment as we go.