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      Federal Reserve issues rare statement asserting independence amid Trump pressure

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      The Federal Reserve issued a rare, strongly worded statement on Thursday after chair Jerome Powell spoke with Donald Trump at the White House on Thursday morning, holding firm on the central bank’s independence amid pressure from Trump to lower interest rates.The three-paragraph statement emphasized the Fed’s independent, non-partisan role in setting monetary policy based on economic data.“Chair Powell did not discuss his expectations for monetary policy, except to stress that the path of policy will depend entirely on incoming economic information and what that means for the outlook,” the statement read.Powell told Trump that he and other Fed officials “will set monetary policy, as required by law, to support maximum employment and stable prices and will make those decisions based solely on careful, objective, and non-political analysis”, according to the statement.That the Fed, which tends to be extremely reserved with public statements, issued the brief memo shows that officials are aware of Trump’s pressure campaign and are standing firm on the Fed’s independence.At Thursday’s White House press briefing, press secretary Karoline Leavitt said that the Fed’s statement is “correct” but that Trump “did say that the Fed chair is making a mistake by not lowering rates”.Historically, presidents show deference to the Fed, respecting the central bank’s independence. But over the last few months, Trump has tried to publicly pressure Powell to lower interest rates, as the Fed did last year, though officials say that the economy – thrown into a tailspin from Trump’s trade war – has become too unstable to continue lowering rates.After Trump’s “liberation day” in early April, when he announced a slate of tariffs that ended up crashing US stock markets, Trump wrote on social media: “This would be a PERFECT time for Fed Chairman Jerome Powell to cut Interest Rates. He is always ‘late,’ but he could now change his image, and quickly.”Powell, who was appointed during Trump’s first term in 2018, has resisted the pressure from Trump and has warned that high tariffs could lead to inflation and, earlier in May, said that officials are “in no hurry” to cut interest rates – all statements that seem to have put Trump on edge.“‘Too Late’ Jerome Powell is a FOOL, who doesn’t have a clue,” Trump wrote after the Fed’s meeting.Trump had previously threatened to fire Powell, though it’s unclear whether the president has the power to do so. Last week, the supreme court allowed Trump to follow through on his dismissal of officials on the National Labor Relations Board, the panel that oversees labor disputes, but judges noted that the Federal Reserve is a “uniquely structured, quasi-private entity” – implying that it likely won’t be so easy for Trump to get rid of Powell. More

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      Federal Reserve warns of inflation and jobs risks amid Trump’s erratic trade strategy

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      The Federal Reserve kept interest rates on hold and called out growing dangers in the US economy amid Donald Trump’s erratic rollout of an aggressive trade strategy.Jerome Powell, the US central bank’s chair, cautioned that the president’s tariffs were likely to raise prices, weaken growth and increase unemployment if maintained.Fed policymakers cautioned that “the risks of higher unemployment and higher inflation have risen” as they opted to maintain the benchmark interest rate for the third time in a row. “Uncertainty about the economic outlook has increased further,” they said in a statement.With inflation expectations – how consumers think prices will move – rising,Powell, the Fed chair, said the “driving factor” appeared to be Trump’s tariffs.At a press conference, he said: “If the large increases in tariffs that have been announced are sustained, they are likely to generate a rise in inflation, a slowdown in economic growth, and an increase in unemployment.”The US president has repeatedly demanded in recent months that the Fed cuts rates – and even raised the prospect of firing Powell, before walking back the comments – as Trump’s tariffs plan appeared to knock the US economy.The Fed has been sitting on its hands for months, however, citing heightened uncertainty. It last cut rates in December, to a range of between 4.25% and 4.5%.As Trump pushed ahead last month with sweeping tariffs on imported goods from much of the world, Powell cautioned this would probably raise prices and slow growth – despite the administration’s pledges to revitalize the US economy and reduce the cost of living for millions of Americans.US gross domestic product (GDP) shrank for the first time in three years during the first quarter, raising fears of recession as Trump’s tariffs – and threats of tariffs – cast a shadow over the world’s largest economy.Asked whether he was trying to take responsibility for stronger parts of the economy, while blaming his predecessor, Joe Biden, for any sign of weakness, Trump told NBC’s Meet The Press: “I think the good parts are the Trump economy, and the bad parts are the Biden economy. Because he’s done a terrible job.”After Fed policymakers finished their latest two-day meeting on Wednesday, the central bank reiterated in its statement that they would “carefully assess incoming data, the evolving outlook, and the balance of risks” ahead of future meetings.Its callout of greater risks in the US economy amounted to “a thinly veiled critique of the new administration’s import tariffs”, said Samuel Tombs, chief US economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics, “and represents an assertion of independence”.Addressing reporters after the meeting, Powell said he could not provide a timeframe for rate cuts. “We are going to need to see how this evolves,” he said. “There are cases in which it would be appropriate for us to cut rates this year. There are cases in which it wouldn’t. And we just don’t know.”While concern over the economic outlook is mounting, Powell stressed there had been no “big economic effects” in the data so far. “People, they are worried now about inflation, they are worried about a shock from the tariffs,” he said. “But they really haven’t – that shock hasn’t hit yet.”Asked how Trump’s demand for rate cuts affected the Fed’s latest decision, and the difficulty of his job, Powell responded bluntly. “Doesn’t affect doing our job at all,” he said.He reserved perhaps his briefest response for when a reporter asked what he thought when Trump said last month he had “no intention” of firing him – days after saying his termination could not come fast enough. “I don’t have anything more for you on that,” said Powell. More

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      Stock markets rise as Trump backtracks on high China tariffs and firing Fed chair

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      Stock markets have risen around the world after Donald Trump said his tariffs on China would come down “substantially” and he had “no intention” of firing the chair of the US central bank, Jerome Powell.Weeks of tough talk on trade from White House officials have rattled investors and Trump now appears to be softening his tone. The president told reporters in Washington on Tuesday he planned to be “very nice” to China in trade talks and that tariffs could drop in both countries if they could reach a deal, adding: “It will come down substantially, but it won’t be zero.”Overnight in Asia, Japan’s Nikkei rose by nearly 2%, Hong Kong’s Hang Seng was up 2.4% and the South Korean Kospi gained 1.6%.The rally spread to Europe in early trading on Wednesday, with the UK’s FTSE 100 index up 1.6%, while the Italian FTSE MIB rose by 1.1%. Germany’s Dax gained 2.6% and France’s Cac 2.1%.Meanwhile, US stocks opened on a high Wednesday morning, with the Dow rallying over 800 points, and the Nasdaq Composite up over 3%. The rally stalled in the afternoon but all the major stock markets managed to end the day higher.On Wednesday, the US treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, also took a softer, optimistic tone on China in remarks delivered at the Institute of International Finance in Washington DC, saying that China “knows it needs to change”.“If China is serious on less dependence on export-led manufacturing growth and rebalancing toward a domestic economy … let’s rebalance together,” Bessent said. “This is an incredible opportunity.”Bessent told investors in a private meeting on Tuesday that he expects a “de-escalation” of the trade war between China and the US in the “very near future”.“‘America First’ does not mean America alone. To the contrary, it is a call for deeper collaboration and mutual respect among trade partners,” Bessent said on Wednesday.Investor confidence also grew after Trump told reporters he would not fire Powell, the chair of the US Federal Reserve, reversing the previous day’s losses triggered by the president calling the central bank boss a “major loser”.The president has criticised the Fed chair repeatedly for refusing to cut interest rates and last week hinted that he believed he could dismiss Powell before his term as the head of the central bank comes to an end in May next year.Trump wrote on his social media platform, Truth Social, last week that Powell’s termination “could not come fast enough”, after the Fed chair raised concerns about the impact of trade tariffs on the American economy.However, the suggestion from the White House that the US central bank will remain independent helped stocks to rise on Wednesday, as well as the prospect of lower tariffs on Chinese imports to the US.The US dollar, which hit a three-year low on Tuesday before recovering, rose by 0.25% against a basket of major currencies.Oil prices also rose on Wednesday, with Brent crude rising above $68 (£51) a barrel amid hopes that lower tariffs will be less damaging to the global economy. The rise was also led by new US sanctions targeting Iranian liquefied petroleum gas and the crude oil shipping magnate Seyed Asadoollah Emamjomeh.Meanwhile, gold, which is traditionally viewed by investors as a safe haven asset during volatile periods, retreated from the new high of $3,500 (£2,620) an ounce it hit on Tuesday, to trade at about $3,307. More

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      The Guardian view on the IMF’s warning: Donald Trump could cost the world a trillion dollars | Editorial

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      Wake up! When the most sober of global institutions, the International Monetary Fund, abandons its usual technocratic calm to sound the alarm on the political roots of global financial instability, it’s time to pay attention. The IMF is warning of a non-negligible risk of a $1tn hit to global output, as Donald Trump’s erratic “America first” agenda – part oligarchic enrichment scheme, part mobster shakedown – collides with a perfect storm of global financial vulnerabilities.Such a shock would be equivalent to a third of that experienced in the 2008 crisis. But it would be felt in a much more fragile and politically charged environment. This time, the crisis stems not just from markets but from the politics at the heart of the dollar system. The IMF’s latest Global Financial Stability Report sees the danger in Mr Trump’s trade policies, especially his “liberation day” announcements, which have pushed up America’s effective tariff rate to the highest in over 100 years.The IMF put investors on notice that Trumpian volatility was taking place as US debt and equities – especially tech stocks – were overvalued. It cautions that hedge funds have made huge bets that have gone sour, requiring them to sell US treasuries for cash and potentially deepening the chaos in bond markets. Ominously, the IMF draws the comparison, first made by the analyst Nathan Tankus, with the “dash for cash” in March 2020 during Covid, when the Federal Reserve rescued US treasury markets directly. Developing nations, already grappling with the highest real borrowing costs in a decade, may now be forced to take on even more expensive debt – the IMF warns – just to cushion the blow from Mr Trump’s new tariffs, risking a dreaded “sudden stop” in capital flows.At the heart of this chaos stands the US, the very country meant to uphold the global financial architecture. Just over a week ago, Adam Tooze of Columbia University wondered if markets had begun to “sell America” after US long-maturity bond prices fell precipitously. He thought that markets were no longer just responding to economic fundamentals but to politics as a systemic risk factor. In this case: Mr Trump’s tariff threats and his increasing political pressure on Fed’s chair, Jerome Powell. In essence, Prof Tooze gave us the theory; the IMF just confirmed the data.The US president’s continued attacks on the Fed chair over the weekend have only added to a flight from US equities, bonds and the dollar itself. The money is fleeing to safe havens such as gold. Some of the loss has been clawed back, but at what cost? Investors aren’t just jittery about inflation or growth – they’re hedging against political chaos. That might explain the seemingly divergent IMF messaging: blunt systemic warnings in its report versus the soothing market-facing comments from a senior official at the fund’s press conference. This is central bank diplomacy. The institution is signalling that it is worried while trying not to spark a self-fulfilling panic in treasuries and the dollar.The real concern here is not technical dysfunction in treasury markets or the mechanics of the Fed, which are the bedrock of the global financial system. It’s about the politicisation of the monetary-fiscal nexus under a Trumpian regime that is fundamentally hostile to the norms of liberal-democratic governance. When even the dollar is no longer a safe haven, what – or who – can be?Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. More

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      Trump says Fed chair would resign if asked and condemns him over interest rates

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      Donald Trump early on Thursday condemned the Federal Reserve chair, Jerome Powell, for not lowering US interest rates, and expressed a wish for him to be gone from his role.The US president lambasted Powell as “always too late and wrong” in a post on his Truth Social platform. Trump noted that the European Central Bank (ECB) was poised on Thursday to lower interest rates again, without mentioning that the body has been responding to the chaos caused by Trump’s initiatives on tariffs.Addressing reporters later in the day, Trump claimed Powell would resign if he asked him to. Powell himself has said that he would not resign if asked to do so by the president.Trump has been pressuring Powell to cut US interest rates for months, even though the central bank is independent of the administration in setting monetary policy and the White House typically does not publicly lobby the Federal Reserve.The ECB had been expected to cut interest rates for the seventh time this year in order to prop up economic growth, and then did so not long before US markets were due to open. Powell enraged Trump on Wednesday night by warning that the president’s sweeping tariffs could raise inflation. That would make the Fed even more hesitant to cut interest rates.Christine Lagarde, the ECB president, in explaining the reasons why it has – unlike the Fed – cut interest rates, said “the economic outlook is clouded by exceptional uncertainty” because of Trump’s tariffs, which constitute a negative demand shock.Lagarde was speaking after cutting the ECB’s main deposit rate by 25 basis points to 2.25%.Europe had been preparing another interest rate cut following the global financial turmoil caused by Trump’s tariffs push, in which he has gone back and forth on whether, when and how deeply to tax imports from other countries, and on which countries, since he returned to the White House for a second term.He retreated sharply earlier this month from his decision to impose tariffs worldwide, pausing most of the charges for 90 days, although most notably not on China, after markets plunged and US government bonds – traditionally seen as one of the world’s safest financial assets – had suffered a dramatic sell-off. Wall Street chiefs and other experts also forecast a heightened likelihood of recession. Economists polled by Reuters on Thursday put US recession odds at 45%.After insisting for days that he would hold firm on his aggressive trade strategy, unveiled in full on 2 April, which he dubbed “liberation day”, Trump announced on 9 April that all countries that had not retaliated against US tariffs would receive a reprieve – and only face a blanket US tariff of 10% – until July.Powell on Wednesday said the US economy was well-positioned but added that Trump’s tariffs were likely to cause “at least a temporary rise in inflation. The inflationary effects could also be more persistent.”He indicated that the prospect of sweeping tariffs on virtually every trade partner could put the Fed in the unenviable position of having to choose between tackling inflation and unemployment.The World Trade Organization, meanwhile, warned that Trump’s tariffs would send international trade into reverse this year, depressing global economic growth.The International Monetary Fund (IMF) managing director, Kristalina Georgieva, said the global outlook was also weakening in the face of the Trump tariff onslaught, adding central banks like the Federal Reserve needed to remain agile and credible.“Resilience is being tested again – by the reboot of the global trading system,” she said.Trump also said as part of his Truth Social post at daybreak on Thursday that “Powell’s termination cannot come fast enough”. He dubbed him, further in the post, “Too Late” and put forward the argument that prices were coming down, from oil to eggs.Trump nominated Powell to become Fed chair during his first term in the White House, in 2018, and Joe Biden renominated him during his term in the White House, in 2022. The US Senate confirms the chair and the US president cannot terminate the head of the Federal Reserve before the end of their four-year fixed stints. Powell is in place until next spring.The US central bank has held interest rates steady at 4.25% to 4.5% since the start of this year.Trump said in his post: “The ECB is expected to cut interest rates for the 7th time, and yet, “Too Late” Jerome Powell of the Fed, who is always TOO LATE AND WRONG, yesterday issued a report which was another, and typical, complete “mess!” Oil prices are down, groceries (even eggs!) are down, and the USA is getting RICH ON TARIFFS. Too Late should have lowered Interest Rates, like the ECB, long ago, but he should certainly lower them now. Powell’s termination cannot come fast enough!”The New York Fed president, John Williams, spoke to Fox Business on TV on Thursday and backed up Powell’s wariness on rates.“I don’t see any need to change the setting of the Fed funds rate any time soon … It’s really about collecting information, understanding better what’s happening in the economy during the rest of this year, understanding kind of how the uncertainty plays out,” Williams said.Meanwhile, Politico, citing unnamed sources, reported after Trump’s post that the treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, had been cautioning White House officials against any attempt to fire Powell, for which there is no tested mechanism, saying it would risk destabilizing financial markets.And there was a fresh alarm bell sounded on the risk of stagflation, in which high inflation combines with high unemployment amid stagnant economic growth.“A sudden crystallization of the threat to Fed independence would both intensify market stress and shift it in more of a stagflationary direction with a sharp increase in tail risk,” Krishna Guha, vice-chair of an arm of the financial advisory firm Evercore ISI, said in a note.Reuters contributed reporting More

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      Majority of Americans wrongly believe US is in recession – and most blame Biden

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      Nearly three in five Americans wrongly believe the US is in an economic recession, and the majority blame the Biden administration, according to a Harris poll conducted exclusively for the Guardian. The survey found persistent pessimism about the economy as election day draws closer.The poll highlighted many misconceptions people have about the economy, including:
      55% believe the economy is shrinking, and 56% think the US is experiencing a recession, though the broadest measure of the economy, gross domestic product (GDP), has been growing.
      49% believe the S&P 500 stock market index is down for the year, though the index went up about 24% in 2023 and is up more than 12% this year.
      49% believe that unemployment is at a 50-year high, though the unemployment rate has been under 4%, a near 50-year low.
      Many Americans put the blame on Biden for the state of the economy, with 58% of those polled saying the economy is worsening due to mismanagement from the presidential administration.The poll underscored people’s complicated emotions around inflation. The vast majority of respondents, 72%, indicated they think inflation is increasing. In reality, the rate of inflation has fallen sharply from its post-Covid peak of 9.1% and has been fluctuating between 3% and 4% a year.In April, the inflation rate went down from 3.5% to 3.4% – far from inflation’s 40-year peak of 9.1% in June 2022 – triggering a stock market rally that pushed the Dow Jones index to a record high.A recession is generally defined by a decrease in economic activity, typically measured as gross domestic product (GDP), over two successive quarters, although in the US the National Bureau of Economic Research (NEBR) has the final say. US GDP has been rising over the last few years, barring a brief contraction in 2022, which the NEBR did not deem a recession.The only recent recession was in 2020, early in the Covid-19 pandemic. Since then, the US economy has grown considerably. Unemployment has also hit historic lows, wages have been going up and consumer spending has been strong.But the road to recovery has been bumpy, largely because of inflation and the Federal Reserve raising interest rates to tamp down high prices.Despite previously suggesting the Fed could start lowering rates this year, Fed officials have recently indicated interest rates will remain elevated in the near future. While inflation has eased considerably since its peak in 2022, officials continue to say inflation remains high because it remains above the Fed’s target of 2% a year.After a tumultuous ride of inflation and high interest rates, voters are uncertain about what’s next. Consumer confidence fell to a six-month low in May.So even though economic data, like GDP, implies strength in the economy, there’s a stubborn gap between the reality represented in that data – what economists use to gauge the economy’s health – and the emotional reality that underlies how Americans feel about the economy. In the poll, 55% think the economy is only getting worse.Some have called the phenomenon a “vibecession”, a term first coined by the economics writer Kyla Scanlon to describe the widespread pessimism about the economy that defies statistics that show the economy is actually doing OK.While inflation has been down, prices are at a higher level compared with just a few years ago. And prices are still going up, just at a slower pace than at inflation’s peak.Americans are clearly still reeling from price increases. In the poll, 70% of Americans said their biggest economic concern was the cost of living. About the same percentage of people, 68%, said that inflation was top of mind.The poll showed little change in Americans’ economic outlook from a Harris poll conducted for the Guardian on the economy in September 2023.A similar percentage of respondents agreed “it’s difficult to be happy about positive economic news when I feel financially squeezed each month” and that the economy was worse than the media made it out to be.Another thing that hasn’t changed: views on the economy largely depend on which political party people belong to. Republicans were much more likely to report feeling down about the economy than Democrats. The vast majority of Republicans believe that the economy is shrinking, inflation is increasing and the economy is getting worse overall. A significant but smaller percentage of Democrats, less than 40%, believed the same.Unsurprisingly, more Republicans than Democrats believe the economy is worsening due to the mismanagement of the Biden administration.Something both Republicans and Democrats agree on: they don’t know who to trust when it comes to learning about the economy. In both September and May, a majority of respondents – more than 60% – indicated skepticism over economic news.The economy continues to present a major challenge to Joe Biden in his re-election bid. Though he has tried to tout “Bidenomics”, or his domestic economy record, including his $1.2tn bipartisan infrastructure bill from 2022, 70% of Republicans and 39% of Democrats seem to think he’s making the economy worse.But it’s not all bad news for Biden. Republican voters were slightly more optimistic about the lasting impacts of “Bidenomics” than they were in the September Harris poll. Four in 10 Republicans, an 11 percentage-point increase from September, indicated they believe Bidenomics will have a positive lasting impact, while 81% of Democrats said the same. And three-quarters of everyone polled said they support at least one of the key pillars of Bidenomics, which include investments in infrastructure, hi-tech electronics manufacturing, clean-energy facilities and more union jobs.Yet even with these small strands of approval, pessimism about the overall economy is pervasive. It will be an uphill battle for Biden to convince voters to be more hopeful.“What Americans are saying in this data is: ‘Economists may say things are getting better, but we’re not feeling it where I live,’” said John Gerzema, CEO of the Harris Poll. “Unwinding four years of uncertainty takes time. Leaders have to understand this and bring the public along.” More

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      Jailed Trump adviser predicts mass deportations as second term priority

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      The first 100 days of a second Donald Trump presidency would see the sacking of the Federal Reserve head, Jerome Powell, mass deportations of undocumented immigrants and higher tariffs on Chinese imports, the ex-president’s former trade adviser Peter Navarro has said.Navarro, the maverick former head of the Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy in Trump’s first administration and a key loyalist, made the forecasts in an interview conducted from prison – where he is serving a four-month sentence for contempt of Congress.Speaking to the website Semafor, Navarro predicted that axing Powell – an establishment figure who was initially appointed as Federal Reserve chair by Trump in 2018 before being reappointed by Joe Biden – would be among the first acts of a newly re-elected President Trump.“Powell raised rates too fast under Trump and choked off growth,” Navarro told Semafor in responses emailed from a prison library in Miami, where he has been putting the finishing touches to a new book, The New Maga Deal, whose title references the former president’s Make America Great Again slogan.“To keep his job, Powell then raised too slowly to contain inflation under Biden,” Navarro said to Semafor. “My guess is that this punctilious non-economist will be gone in the first 100 days one way or another.”He predicted that Powell – who served in the presidential administration of the late George HW Bush – could be replaced by either Kevin Hassett or Tyler Goodspeed, both former chairs of the council of economic advisers.The first order of business in a second Trump presidency, however, would be intensifying a rumbling trade war with China, said Navarro, a noted hawk on Chinese trade policy.“At the top of the trade list is Trump’s Reciprocal Trade Act, first introduced by congressman Sean Duffy in 2019,” he wrote. “If countries refuse to lower their tariffs to ours, the president would have the authority to raise our tariffs to theirs.”Asked about unfinished business likely to be revisited, Navarro identified mass deportation and reinforcing a “buy American” policy.“Trump will quickly close down the border and begin mass deportations,” he said, accusing Biden of “importing a wave of crime and terrorism along with an uneducated mass that drives down the wages of Black, brown and blue-collar Americans”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionDespite – or perhaps partly because of – his incarceration for refusing to cooperate with the congressional investigation into Trump supporters’ 6 January 2021 attack on the US Capitol, Navarro remains an authoritative source on insider thinking in the former president’s camp.Several members of Trump’s inner circle have visited Navarro during his confinement in a minimum security facility, according to Semafor, fuelling speculation that he could play a key role in a future administration.Reinforcing that impression, Navarro said his book identified 100 actions that Trump would take in the first 100 days of a second presidency. He said he planned to attend the Republican national convention in mid-July – where Trump is expected to be anointed as the GOP presidential candidate – if he is released from prison in time.While he was close to the former president throughout his first administration, Navarro’s views on trade are considered fringe by many mainstream economists. He is a vocal critic of Germany, as well as China, and has accused both countries of currency manipulation. More

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      US adds 216,000 jobs in December as stronger than expected rise caps robust year

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      The US workforce added 216,000 jobs last month, more than expected by economists, capping another robust year of growth in the face of higher interest rates.Policymakers, weighing when to start cutting borrowing costs, are closely monitoring the strength of the labor market as they try to guide the world’s largest economy to a so-called “soft landing”, where price growth normalizes and recession is avoided.American employers had been expected by economists to add about 164,000 jobs in December, down from 173,000 the previous month. Recruitment across the public, healthcare, social assistance and construction sectors helped drive growth as 2023 drew to a close.Overall, Friday’s official data showed that 2.7m jobs were added in the US economy over the course of last year – down from 4.8m in 2022.While its growth has slowed, the labor force has defied fears of a downturn after the Federal Reserve launched an aggressive campaign to pull back inflation from its highest levels in a generation. It remained resilient last year in the midst of layoffs and strikes.The headline unemployment rate stood at 3.7% in December, according to data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in line with November.While last month’s jobs growth reading was significantly higher than forecast by economists, the agency revised its estimates for October and November lower. As a result, the US workforce in these two months was some 71,000 jobs smaller than previously reported.As price growth continues to decline, officials at the Fed – which last hiked interest rates in July – are now mulling the future of its battle. Jerome Powell, the central bank’s chairman, said last month that the historic tightening of monetary policy was probably over, and that discussions on cuts in borrowing costs were coming “into view”.The official jobs report is closely scrutinized by Wall Street each month for signs of how the US economy is faring. The S&P 500 started the day slightly higher in New York.Nancy Vanden Houten, lead US economist at Oxford Economics, said: “There is a lot of noise in the data, but we continue to expect that there will be enough evidence of a further loosening in labor market conditions and a decline in inflation more broadly to allow the Fed to begin cutting rates in May.”Growth in private sector employment “continues to slow relentlessly, even after the upside surprise” in December, said Ian Shepherdson, chief economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics. “Behind the headline, the trend in job growth is slowing, with more softening to come.” More