The writer is president and chief investment strategist at Yardeni Research
From early March 2022 through August 2024, Federal Reserve officials aimed to tighten monetary policy sufficiently to bring inflation down even though it was widely expected to cause a recession. They succeeded in doing so without a recession.
Now inflation is closing in on their 2.0 per cent target, they are aiming to keep the unemployment rate from rising. They intend to do so by lowering the federal funds rate to its “neutral” level, at which inflation remains subdued while unemployment remains low. This nirvana level is often called R-star (or R*) by economists.