Fed minutes raise expectations for December hike
WASHINGTON (AP) — Federal Reserve officials earlier this month believed it would be appropriate to raise a key interest rate "relatively soon," with some arguing for a hike at the Fed's next meeting in December in order to preserve the Fed's credibility.
Some officials argued that if the Fed did not raise rates at its December meeting, it ran the risk of harming the central bank's credibility given the many signals it had sent about an impending hike.
Economists believed that the Fed would not want to risk destabilizing financial markets with a rate hike just before voters went to the polls.
[...] a significant slowdown in U.S. growth in the first half of the year, as well as global weakness and periodic bouts of financial market turbulence, has kept the central bank on the sidelines.
Private economists say forecasting the path of Fed rate hikes has gotten harder given the uncertainty after Trump's election.