At the beginning of this year, the smart money said that the Federal Reserve was likely to finally raise interest rates at its meeting in June. But events this year have made that possibility more and more remote, and the minutes of the Fed's April meeting, released yesterday, made it almost official: Federal Reserve officials don't expect to raise rates at their next meeting in June
The good news is that the Fed doesn't expect the first-quarter economic slowdown to last. They blamed the weak quarter on the weather and noticed the recent pattern of subpar first quarters. They did also say they were surprised that the drop in gas prices hadn't resulted in a splurge of consumer spending.
The Fed expects the economy to return to a “moderate pace” of growth in the second quarter, although the economic signals have been mixed. Since the meeting, payrolls figures have improved, while weaker-than-forecast data on manufacturing and retail sales prompted some economists to tamp down their second-quarter expectations.
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