The Federal Reserve\u2019s policymakers are likely to resume cutting the central bank\u2019s main interest rate, though most analysts think they will only do it by a quarter percentage point.<\/p>\n
I think they should act boldly and cut it by a half point.<\/p>\n
This makes me sound like President Donald Trump and his acolytes, who want lower interest rates so badly they incessantly criticize important leaders of the Fed, clearly willing to damage the Fed\u2019s independence and the nation\u2019s reputation among global investors to get their way.<\/p>\n
But no. The Fed needs to jolt the economy because Trump and his team are the problem. They have badly mismanaged it with their pursuit of tariffs and an indiscriminate crackdown on immigration.<\/p>\n
Even though stock market indices are hitting all-time highs now, Trump\u2019s economic policies created enormous uncertainty with business owners, leaders and consumers. As a result, America\u2019s economic growth has been cut in half this year, unemployment is steadily rising, hiring is frozen, consumer spending is slowing and the housing market is stalled. <\/p>\n
Here in Minnesota, economic growth is slower than the nation\u2019s<\/a>, but unemployment is lower than the nation\u2019s<\/a>. We\u2019ll get new unemployment data for the state on Thursday, and quarterly data on the state\u2019s economic growth comes at the end of the month.<\/p>\n One problematic sector is farming and food production, which accounts for about one-sixth of Minnesota\u2019s economic output.<\/p>\n The weather has been great this summer here and in much of the nation. Yields are going to be huge for corn and soybeans. The market has been expecting that for months and, consequently, prices for those crops are low.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Federal Reserve\u2019s policymakers are likely to resume cutting the central bank\u2019s main interest rate, though most analysts…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":158855,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[28,101],"class_list":["post-158854","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-economy","tag-business","tag-economy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/158854","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=158854"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/158854\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/158855"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=158854"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=158854"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=158854"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}