Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said the central bank didn’t raise interest rates last week as it wanted to slow down its historically rapid pace of increases, but stressed it would likely lift rates again in coming months, the Wall Street Journal reported. “We moved very quickly at the beginning, and we’ve gradually slowed down. This is just a continuation of that,” Powell said yesterday at a Senate Banking Committee hearing. The decision to hold rates steady, after 10 consecutive increases, was designed “to give ourselves more time — to stretch out the time for making these decisions.” Inflation and economic activity haven’t slowed as much as many officials anticipated this year, casting more uncertainty about how high they might lift rates. “We’re close but there’s a little further to go with rate hikes,” Powell said. At their policy meeting last week, officials left the benchmark federal-funds rate in a range between 5% and 5.25%. Most of them projected two more increases this year, which would take it to a 22-year high. At a House Financial Services Committee hearing on Wednesday, Powell called those expectations “a pretty good guess of what will happen if the economy performs as expected.”
