. The resulting higher costs for a broad range of loans — from mortgages and credit cards to auto loans and business borrowing — have taken a toll on growth.
The bottom line is that the U.S. economy is still growing above trend, and the Fed will be wondering if they need to do more to slow this economy.Still, they have yet to tip the United States into a widely forecast recession. Optimism has been growing that a recession isn't coming after all, that the Fed can engineer a so-called "soft-landing" — slowing the economy enough to bring inflation down to its 2% annual target without wrecking an expansion of surprising durability.
This week, the International Monetary Fund upgraded its forecast for U.S. economic growth for all of 2023 to 1.8%. Though that would be down from 2.1% growth for 2022, it marked an increase from the 1.6% growth that the IMF had predicted for 2023 back in April. At a news conference Wednesday after the Fed announced its latest quarter-point rate hike, Chair Jerome Powell revealed that the central bank's staff economists no longer foresee a recession in the United States. In April, the minutes of the central bank's March meeting had revealed that the Fed's staff economists envisioned a "mild" recession later this year.
In his remarks, Powell noted that the economy has proved resilient despite the Fed's rapid rate hikes. And he said he still thinks a soft landing remains possible.
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