The Federal Reserve is scheduled to hold its next meeting this week, and will announce its decision on a June rate hike Wednesday.
The common consensus is that the Fed will raise interest rates in June, however latest Federal Open Market Committee meeting minutes created a seed of doubt. Fannie Mae forecasted that the Fed will raise rates in June and December.
But now, one analyst says the expected June rate hike might be the last one for a while. One analyst, Christopher Whalen, writes that, “We worry about the fact that the latest period of exuberance engineered by the FOMC has embedded significant future losses in the financial system.”
He explained in a blog for the Institutional Risk Analyst that FOMC members are beginning to see the U.S. economy slowing down. Rising credit losses will force the central bank to stop in its path toward normalization to prepare its battle against debt deflation.
From the blog:
Irving Fisher noted in 1933 “that great depressions are curable and preventable through reflation and stabilization,” but it remains questionable whether the FOMC has in fact achieved either of these blissful ends over the past eight years. Fisher worried that “when over-indebtedness is so great as to depress prices faster than liquidation, the mass effort to get out of debt sinks us more deeply into debt,” but in 2017 the problem is different.
Whalen even questions if the Fed will be forced to publicly reverse course on rate increases and even cut rates.
“Thus we expect June to be the last rate hike by the Fed in 2017 and perhaps for years to come,” he wrote.
