Stock market today: S&P 500 slips with Feds Powell in the spotlight – Yahoo Finance
The Federal Reserve will announce its policy decision at 2 p.m. ET, followed by Chair Powell’s press conference at 2:30 p.m. ET.The central bank is widely expected to hold rates steady, putting emphasis on what Powell says about the likelihood of interest rate cuts this year.Yahoo Finance\'s Jennifer Schonberger has the preview:Fed Chairman Jerome Powell is likely to reiterate at his press conference that there is no urgency to act anytime soon.The reason: Inflation is stickier than anticipated in 2024.His message could be a repeat of a higher-for-longer stance taken a couple of weeks ago when Powell said that it would take "longer than expected" to achieve the confidence needed to get inflation down to the central bank’s 2% target."Given the strength of the labor market and progress on inflation so far, it\'s appropriate to allow restrictive policy further time to work and let
the data and the evolving outlook guide us," Powell said on April 16.Markets reacted to those comments by pulling back their expectations for 2024. Traders now are pricing in just one rate cut for the year, down from the median of three cuts estimated by Fed officials in
March.Powell "almost has to be somewhat noncommittal because the question of rate cuts and the timing of rate cuts and even the question of a rate hike are all in the air at the moment," former Atlanta Fed president Dennis Lockhart told Yahoo Finance Live on Monday."He simply cannot be definitive on any particular path or policy."Investors will listen for any hints about how Powell\'s thinking about cuts has changed and what data is needed before the cuts can begin.The shift in market expectations comes after three straight months of higher-than-expected inflation readings on two indexes: the Consumer Price Index (CPI) and the Fed’s preferred gauge, the Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE) Index.So-called core PCE, which excludes volatile food and energy prices, rose at a clip of 2.8% year over year for the month of March, which was the same level as February and a tenth of a percent higher than expected.The three-month annualized reading on core PCE jumped to 4.4%, a move economists say is enough to concern Fed officials that inflation may be accelerating.
