The Chair of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, has signaled that the Fed is now prepared to start cutting the interest rate, saying in a speech at the Federal Reserve Board’s meeting in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, that “the time has come.”
The current rate, which is at a 23-year high, was repeatedly raised by the Fed since inflation spiked two years ago. The goal of the rate hikes was to help bring inflation down to 2 percent – currently, it’s sitting at 2.5 percent according to the Fed’s preferred method of measuring inflation. However, inflation remained stubbornly high through much of the last two years, and several job reports throughout that period also indicated that jobs and wages were running hotter than expected.
But several of those jobs reports have since been revised downward. What’s more, the most recent Labor Bureau statistics showed the remaining measurements were…
