Bond Traders Are Kept in Limbo After Powell Offers Few Clues
- Traders pare back bets on interest-rate cuts this year
- Fed holds rates steady, pausing for further inflation progress
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Bond traders emerged from the Federal Reserve’s meeting exactly where they were before it began: with little conviction about where interest rates are headed as President Donald Trump casts uncertainty over the direction of the economy.
Treasury yields briefly jumped after the central bank’s statement appeared to indicate that it held rates steady because its progress on taming inflation had ebbed. But Chair Jerome Powell quickly swatted away those worries — saying he expects consumer-price increases to continue to slow — and yields came back down, ending the day virtually unchanged and echoing the swings in the US equity market.