Tag: U.S. ECONOMY

Biden Says He Will Reverse Trump’s Tax Cuts

BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images

By John Carney – 7/1/2020

Joe Biden told Wall Street donors to his campaign that he planned to reverse most of President Donald Trump’s tax cuts.

“I’m going to get rid of the bulk of Trump’s $2 trillion tax cut,” Biden said during a fundraising conference call, Fox Business Network reported. “And a lot of you may not like that but I’m going to close loopholes like capital gains and stepped-up basis.”

The former vice president said he would raise the corporate tax rate from 21 percent to 28 percent, which he estimated would raise taxes by $1.3 trillion over the next decade, FBN reported.

Biden said the tax cuts were “irresponsible, sugar-high tax cuts.” He claimed, without evidence, that cutting taxes made it “harder to foot the bill” for pandemic relief. In fact, interest rates have declined while government spending on pandemic relief programs has skyrocketed.

“We have to think as big as the challenge we face. But this is America, there is nothing we cannot do if we do it together,” Biden said, according to CNBC. “But I think the country is ready.”

The event raised at least $2 million, CNBC reported.

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Art of the Comeback? Record 2.5 Million Jobs Added! Unemployment Falls to 13.3%

TOPSHOT - US President Donald Trump speaks during a 'Evangelicals for Trump' campaign event held at the King Jesus International Ministry on January 03, 2020 in Miami, Florida. (Photo by JIM WATSON / AFP) (Photo by JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images)

By

JOHN CARNEY

The unemployment rate fell to 13.3 percent and payrolls unexpectedly rose by 2.5 million workers as the easing of restrictions on business activity and government aid led to new hiring in May.

The U.S. unemployment rate fell below last month’s record-high 14.7 percent, which was the highest on record in data going back to 1948. Economists estimate that the unemployment rate reached 25 percent during the Great Depression, although that predated the scientific economy-wide record keeping the government now deploys.

The job gains mark a sudden turnaround from a month earlier, when the economy shed a staggering 20.5 million jobs, by far the worst monthly decline on records back to 1939.

Economists had expected the unemployment rate to rise to nearly 20 percent and the economy to shed an additional 8 million jobs.

The mandatory closures of many businesses and stay-at-home orders slammed what had been a very healthy labor market hard. The economy added jobs for 113 straight weeks through February, a record streak of growth. The unemployment rate was 3.5 percent in February. And yet job creation was running very hot, with the economy adding an average of 211,000 new jobs each month.

The government has undertaken unprecedented efforts to support employment and provide aid to those who have lost their jobs. Around 150 million taxpayers received stimulus payments of up to $1200 for adults in their household plus additional amounts for children. The Treasury’s Paycheck Protection Program is backing $669 billion of loans to small businesses that can be forgiven if borrowers do not lay off workers. The federal government has been providing an additional $600 on top of state unemployment benefits, paying some Americans more than they earned on the job.

Recent data suggest the labor market has been stabilizing and is now improving. The number of people applying for unemployment benefits has declined every week since hitting a record high 6.8 million in March. Last week, this number fell to around 1.8 million. Over 40 million new claims have been made for unemployment since the wave but ongoing claims are just over 20 million, indicating many Americans have been rehired after losing jobs.

In May, employment in leisure and hospitality jumped by 1.2 million after falling by 7.5 million in April and 743,000 in March. Bars and restaurants hired an additional 1.4 million workers following a combined 6.1 million in job losses in April and March.

Construction employment jumped by 464,000 in May, gaining back almost half of April’s decline.

Dentist offices added 245,000 jobs. Health care employment overall rose by 312,00.

Retail shops added  368,000 jobs in May, after a loss of 2.3 million inApril. Over-the-month job gains occurred in clothing and clothing accessories stores were 95,000. Auto dealers added 85,000. General merchandise stores added 84,000.

Manufacturers added 225,000 jobs, about evenly split between the durable and nondurable goods components. Twenty-eight thousand of those were in auto making plants.

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Jobs Stay Solid: 130,000 Created in August, Wages Up 3.2% Black Unemployment to Record-Low 5.5% Labor Force Participation Rate Still Climbing

CAP

By John Carney

The U.S. economy created 130,000 jobs in August and the unemployment rate remained steady at 3.7 percent.

Economists had expected the economy to between 150,000 and 180,000 with the median consensus at 163,000, according to Econoday. Unemployment was expected to remain unchanged. Last month’s jobs figure was originally reported at 164,000, now revised down to 159,000, and unemployment was 3.7 percent.

Although the headline number was weaker than expected, wage growth was strong in August. Average hourly earnings for all employees on private nonfarm payrolls rose by 11 cents to $28.11, or 0.4 percent, following 9-cent gains in both June and July. Over the past 12 months, average hourly earnings have increased by 3.2 percent. In August, average hourly earnings of private-sector production and nonsupervisory employees rose by 11 cents to $23.59.

Unemployment among African Americans fell to 5.5 percent, the lowest level on record.

The labor force participation rate edged up to 63.2 percent in August, indicating that the strong labor market has continued to draw Americans into the workforce.

The largest job gains came from professional and business services, which added 37,000.  Census hiring boosted the federal government’s hiring to 28,000 workers. Health care added 24,000 to the total while financial services increased by 15,000.

There were little to no gains in August for construction, manufacturing, transportation and warehousing, and leisure and hospitality. Holding the line on manufacturing jobs is a sign of strength given signs that manufacturing activity fell this summer.

The retail sector shed 11,ooo jobs, with department stores losing 15,000 jobs (partially offset by gains in other retail venues). Over the year, so-called “general merchandise” retails jobs have fallen by 80,000.

While the economy continued to grow in the second and third quarter, it has slowed from the rapid 3.1 percent rate of growth in the first three months of the year. Manufacturing appears to have contracted and business investment has been weak, with surveys indicating that uncertainty around trade policy and global economic weakness have become a drag on the U.S.

Consumer spending and the labor market have been strong. Data released Thursday showed worker compensation rising strongly and well-above inflation. Rising labor costs can promote capital investment by businesses seeking to make workers more productive.
With unemployment near 50-year lows, job growth has slowed and many businesses say they are having trouble hiring. Employment growth has averaged 158,000 per month thus far this year, compared with an average monthly gain of 223,000 in 2018.

 

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Democrat Presidential Candidate Julián Castro: Open the Borders

By Neil Munro

The Associated Press

Democratic presidential hopeful Julián Castro is hoping to win primary voters by urging an open-borders policy, even though his plan would likely shrink wages and spike rents for the party’s base of lower-income voters.

Castro, a former housing secretary in President Barack Obama’s cabinet, announced his innovative promise to cut voters’ wages via a friendly interview in the Washington Post:

Democratic presidential candidate Julián Castro offered a far-reaching plan to remake the nation’s immigration policy Tuesday with a new call to end criminal penalties for migrants entering the country without permission and a plan to remove detention as a tool for most immigration enforcement.

…

By repealing the criminal code that allows the Trump administration to prosecute people who enter the country, Castro would remove the mechanism that previously allowed the administration to separate asylum-seeking parents and children after detention. Trump has since stopped those prosecutions, though single adults continue to face criminal penalties. Castro said he would impose a civil legal process for sorting out refu­gee applications and deportations, with an emphasis on jailing and removing those with criminal records.

Castro also wants to amnesty the population of at least 11 million illegals in the United States, to accelerate the chain-migration of foreigners into the United States, to boost the inflow of refugees, and to end construction of a border barrier. He would also block the power of ICE to enforce the nation’s immigration laws, so further reducing the already small threat of repatriation for the growing population of at least 11 million illegals in the United States.

Overall, Castro’s policy would explode the population of non-Americans in the United States and so further expand opportunities for Latino politicians and power-brokers. In February 2019, Breitbart reported Castro’s political roots in Latino identity politics:

Castro’s mother, Maria del Rosario Castro, or Rosie Castro, was a major leftist organizer who co-founded La Raza Unida, an extremist third party separatist group in the 1970s. La Raza Unida literally translates to “The Race United,” and the group sought to create a new country in the American Southwest called Aztlan. Breitbart News has run a number of pieces over the years on this group and the Castro family’s connections to it, but perhaps the most interesting thing about Castro’s presidential campaign launch is that he did not shy away from this radical upbringing; he embraced it.

The Washington Post reporter, Michael Scherer, did not ask Castro how Americans voters would gain or lose amid of flood of blue-collar and white-collar labor. The reporter did not address how a massive rise of the immigrant population would help lower-income Americans keep their homes in neighborhoods that are already seeing rising real-estate prices, such as New York and Los Angeles.

Instead, Castro and Scherer treated the migration issue merely as a matter of the migrants’ welfare. This skew hides the greatest economic impact of migration — the transfer of blue-collar wages and white-collar salaries earned by ordinary Americans and legal immigrants up to wealthy, older recipients, including investors, CEOs, and real estate owners.

Also, Castro and Scherer treated the migration as only a humanitarian crisis, and portrayed the migrants as helpless victims, which are described as “asylum-seeking families.” Castro told Scherer that “We see this administration’s approach to immigration is a total failure. Instead of marching forward with cruelty, I believe we should choose compassion.”

That approach dismisses the strong evidence that the migrants are rationally exploiting the many legal loopholes which are being held open by Democrats, judges and business lobbyists, to win jobs and residency for their children in the peaceful, prosperous United States.

Scherer did not reply to questions from Breitbart News.

The focus by Castro and Scherer on the migrants’ welfare and on humanitarian concerns also echoes the bipartisan claim that the United States is a “nation of immigrants,” not a nation of and for Americans.

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The voting public is likely to strongly oppose Castro’s open-borders and cheap-labor policy.

Each year, roughly four million young Americans join the workforce after graduating from high school or university. But the federal government then imports approximately 1.1 million legal immigrants, refreshes a resident population of roughly 1.5 million white-collar guest workers and roughly 500,000 blue-collar visa workers, and also tolerates about eight million illegal workers.

This federal policy of flooding the market with cheap white-collar graduates and blue-collar foreign labor is intended to boost economic growth for investors. This policy shiftsenormous wealth from young employees towards older investors, widens wealth gaps, reduces high-tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, hurts children’s schools and college education, pushes Americans away from high-tech careers, and sidelines millions of marginalized Americans, including many who are now struggling with fentanyl addictions.

But the Washington Post article also put a racial, class, and regional skew on the rational public opposition to elite support for cheap-labor migration:

Some Democratic strategists are wary of turning off white voters in swing states of the upper Midwest who Trump has been able to sway with anti-immigration rhetoric.

Those views of “white voters” have been validated by President Donald Trump’s “Hire American” policy which has raised wages in 2018 by limiting the inflow of new workers in 2017 and 2018:

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Amnesty advocates rely on business-funded “Nation of Immigrants” push polls to show apparent voter support for immigration and immigrants.

But “choice” polls reveal most voters’ often-ignored preference that CEOs should hire Americans at decent wages before hiring migrants. Those Americans include many blue-collar Blacks, Latinos, and people who hide their opinions from pollsters. Similarly, the 2018 polls show that GOP voters are far more concerned about migration — more properly, the economics of migration — than they are concerned about illegal migration and MS-13, taxes, or House Speaker Rep. Nancy Pelosi.

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NOT A SINGLE SENATE DEMOCRAT VOTES “FOR” GREEN NEW DEAL

Not A Single Senate Democrat Votes "For" Green New Deal

Instead of voicing their support for the most ludicrous proposal in socialist history, 43 Democrats decided to take the easy way out

By Tyler Durden

How embarrassing is the green new deal?

So embarrassing that when Senate majority leader McConnell tried to force the Democratic party’s presidential contenders into an embarrassing vote over the berserk, MMT-inducing climate-change proposal (which Republicans are confident that even sober liberal will oppose), not a single Democrat voted for it. Instead, in the vote which was blocked late on Tuesday with a vote of 0-57, 43 Democrats voted merely “present”, including the Senate’s half-dozen presidential candidates, to sidestep the GOP maneuver and, as Bloomberg put it, “buy time to build their campaign positions.”

The vote was the first of many attempts by Republicans to force (socialist, MMT) supporters of the Green New Deal to come into the spotlight and suffer the public scrutiny. The proposal – mostly a collection of goals for mitigating climate change rather than a fully formed plan of action – which according to some would cost north of $100 trillion and would require the launch of helicopter money, also known as “MMT”, has been a favorite target for criticism by McConnell and Republicans ever since freshman Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts rolled it out in February.

“I could not be more glad that the American people will have the opportunity to learn precisely where each one of their senators stand on this radical, top-down, socialist makeover of the entire U.S. economy,” McConnell said before the vote.

Alas, that opportunity was denied because instead of voicing their support for the most ludicrous proposal in socialist history, 43 Democrats decided to take the easy way out.

Even the six Democratic presidential contenders, including Cory Booker of New Jersey, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Kamala Harris of California, Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, all voted present.

At this point, the candidates for the Democratic nomination generally haven’t spelled out specific proposals. Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey has called the Green New Deal “bold,” and Senator Kamala Harris of California has said it’s “an investment” worth the cost. Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota described it somewhat less enthusiastically, as an “aspiration” to act on climate change.

Fresh off what has been dubbed the best day in Trump’s presidency, on Tuesday Trump, no longer the subject of Russia collusion conspiracy theories, met with Senate Republicans at the Capitol, and according to Lindsey Graham the president told them regarding the Green New Deal, “make sure you don’t kill it too much because I want to run against it” in 2020.

Well, so far so good. In an attempt to save face with progressives, Adam Green, a co-founder of the grassroots Progressive Change Campaign Committee, said McConnell was trying to force some “no” votes at a time when Democrats are still reviewing the plan. Voting “present” shows that Democrats aren’t going to hamper things with an early dissent, he said.

While the “present” votes were to be expected, what came as a surprise is that three Democrats voted with Republicans against the resolution including Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, and Doug Jones of Alabama, who faces a tough re-election campaign next year in a deep-red state. Independent Angus King of Maine, a member of the Democratic caucus, also voted against the measure.

The challenge for Democrats looking ahead to next year’s campaigns is to avoid having their support for a still-evolving climate proposal tarred by Republican efforts to portray it as an extremist agenda that would do away with hamburgers and airplane travel.

“It’s one thing to be on the campaign trail and say here is what I believe in and fill in the details,” said Democratic strategist Rodell Mollineau, who was a top aide to former Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid. “It’s another thing to go on record and let other people fill in the details for you.”

As Bloomberg notes, “the Green New Deal has more than 100 congressional Democrats as co-sponsors, including the six senators running for president. While Democrats are united on the need for significant action to stem climate change, they don’t agree on specific proposals.” As a result, McConnell introduced his own version, drawing on the language of the Democratic measure.

Top Senate Democrat Chuck Schumer tried to shield Democrats from having to expose splits between moderates and progressives on the issue. He dismissed the vote as “gotcha politics” intended by Republicans to distract from the fact that they don’t have their own plan to curb greenhouse gas emissions.

“Republicans want to force this political stunt to distract from the fact that they neither have a plan nor a sense of urgency to deal with the threat of climate change,” he said.

Following tonight’s Senate vote, Democrats plan to introduce a resolution in the House this week that calls for the U.S. to remain part of the Paris Climate Accord and requires the Trump administration to create a plan to meet its emission reduction goal, according to a senior Democratic aide. As a reminder, in 2017 Trump announced that he intends to pull out of the Paris agreement, under which the U.S. pledged to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by at least 26 percent from 2005 levels by 2025.

While Senate Democrats weren’t under any real pressure from outside progressive groups to vote for the Green New Deal at this point, they will be in due course.

Meanwhile, capitalizing on the ultra-liberal faction within the Democratic Party, the GOP’s message focuses on the botched February rollout of the proposal, which included the release of documents from Ocasio-Cortez’s office promising economic security even for those “unwilling to work,” and suggesting the eventual elimination of air travel and “farting cows.”

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INSANE VIDEO! Democratic Socialism In AOC’s Own Words: We Don’t Want To Take Over EVERY Form Of Production – We Just Want To Tell Every Workplace How To Operate

by Nan and Byron McKeeby

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Rep Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez retweeted herself again, and this one is for the record books.

Watch as she explains Democratic Socialism. I’ve taken the liberty of transcribing it below for closer examination.

Ocasio-Cortez: Ya know just as there’s all this fear mongering that government is going to take over every corporation and government is going to take over every business or every form of production, um, we should be scared right now because corporations have taken over our government.

And in my opinion, we should be weary of any entity in which both of those things are combined, whether it’s through one way or the other. Um, and that’s why the emphasis in Democratic Socialism is on duhmocracy. And it’s not about, you know, it, it’s, it’s just as much a transformation about bringing duhmocracy to the workplace so that we have a say, and that we don’t check all of our rights at the door every time we cross the threshold into our workplace. Because at the end of the day as workers and as people in society, we’re the ones creating wealth. Not a corporate CEO. It’s not a CEO that’s actually creating four billion dollars a year. It is the millions of workers in this country that’s creating billions of dollars of economic productivity a year. And our system should reflect that.

Let’s deconstruct this–

Right out of the gate, she describes opposition to Democratic Socialism as “fear mongering” and without skipping a beat, tells us “we should be scared right now because corporations have taken over out government.” Who’s the fear monger again?

Like a broken clock, AOC gets something right when she says, “We should be weary of any entity in which both of those things (corporations and government) are combined” but then she pulls an immediate u-turn with this bit of insanity, “it’s just as much a transformation about bringing duhmocracy to the workplace.”

There should be exactly as much “duhmocracy” in the workplace as the owners decide they want/need in order to foster the environment they – as OWNERS OF PRIVATE PROPERTY, GOODS, AND SERVICES – deem necessary to remain profitable. What AOC is describing is literally the very definition of a marriage between the govt and corporations in order to regulate what people can and can’t do with their private property/business/investments. I’m certain there’s a name for that style of government but it escapes me at the moment.

LAST – AOC takes credit for “billions of dollars of economic productivity a year” on behalf of “workers” (as though CEOs don’t work).

She must be unaware that America’s GDP is just a bit higher than that.

CAP

That’s okay. She was only off by $20.5 trillion give or take. She’s still learning. Representing is hard.

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IS THE FEDERAL RESERVE ACTUALLY TRYING TO CAUSE A STOCK MARKET CRASH?

Is The Federal Reserve Actually TRYING To Cause A Stock Market Crash?

It is insanity to raise interest rates when stocks are already crashing, but the Federal Reserve did it anyway

Michael Snyder | Economic Collapse – DECEMBER 20, 2018

The Federal Reserve has decided not to come to the rescue this time. 

All of the economic numbers tell us that the economy is slowing down, and on Wednesday Fed Chair Jerome Powell even admitted that economic conditions are “softening”, but the Federal Reserve raised interest rates anyway.  As one top economist put it, raising rates as we head into an economic downturn is “economic malpractice”.  They know that higher rates will slow down the economy even more, but it isn’t as if the Fed was divided on this move.  In fact, it was a unanimous vote to raise rates.  They clearly have an agenda, and that agenda is definitely not about helping the American people.

Early on Wednesday, Wall Street seemed to believe that the Federal Reserve would do the right thing, and the Dow was up nearly 400 points.  But then the announcement came, and the market began sinking dramatically.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 720 points in just two hours, and the Dow ended the day down a total of 351 points.  This is the lowest that the Dow has been all year, 60 percent of the stocks listed on the S&P 500 are in bear market territory, and at this point approximately four trillion dollars of stock market wealth has been wiped out.

We haven’t seen anything like this since the last financial crisis.  This is officially the worst quarter for the stock market since the fourth quarter of 2008, and it is the worst December that Wall Street has experienced since 1931.

It is insanity to raise interest rates when stocks are already crashing, but the Federal Reserve did it anyway.

They knew what kind of reaction this would cause on Wall Street and in other global markets, but that didn’t stop them.  The financial world is in utter turmoil, and this move by the Fed has definitely added fuel to the fire.

Could it be possible that they actually want a stock market crash?

Some are suggesting that the reason why the vote was unanimous was because they wanted to send a “strong signal” to President Trump.  He has been extremely critical of the Federal Reserve in recent weeks, and this could be a way for the Fed to show Trump who is really in charge.

They are calling this “the Trump economy”, but that is simply not true.  And when Barack Obama was in the White House, it wasn’t “the Obama economy” either.  Ultimately, it is the Federal Reserve that is running the economy, and they fiercely guard their independence and their authority.

President Trump knows that the only way that he is going to win in 2020 is if the economy is doing well, and he also understands that higher interest rates will slow the economy down.

So essentially the Federal Reserve has a tremendous amount of political power in their hands.

During the Obama era, the Fed pushed interest rates all the way to the floor and kept them there for many years.

But now the Federal Reserve has raised interest rates seven times since Donald Trump took office, and four of those rate hikes have been under current Fed Chair Jerome Powell.

Needless to say, it certainly doesn’t take a lot of imagination to figure out how Donald Trump is feeling about Powell at this moment.

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Meanwhile, we continue to get more indications that the U.S. economy is heading for difficult times.  Just consider the following news about FedEx…

FedEx shares are plunging after what Morgan Stanley called a “jarring” cut to its annual forecasts, suggesting global growth is slowing far more than most expect – in fact, the bank hinted at the possibility of a “severe recession” unfolding – and prompting expectations of an “uber-dovish hike” by the Fed.

The global logistics bellwether slashed its outlook just three months after raising the view, reflecting an unexpected and abrupt change in the company’s view of the global economy amid rising trade tensions between the U.S. and China. Not only were the cuts were deeper than the Street expected according to Morgan Stanley analyst Ravi Shanker, but everyone is pointing to the following comment from the press release: “Global trade has slowed in recent months and leading indicators point to ongoing deceleration in global trade near-term.”

To see the term “severe recession” used in such a context is more than just a little bit alarming.

The last time the U.S. economy went through a recession, millions of Americans lost their jobs and we saw a wave of mortgage defaults unlike anything we had ever seen before in modern American history.

Are we about to go through something similar?

Earlier today, a CNN article also used the term “recession”, and it discussed the fact that investors now want big corporations to focus on paying down their debts instead of buying back shares of stock…

Fears of an economic slowdown — or even recession — have turned a spotlight on the debt that businesses piled up during the past decade, when borrowing costs were historically low.

For the first time since the Great Recession, investors want companies to prioritize paying down debt rather than investing in the future or share buybacks and dividends, according to a Bank of America Merrill Lynch survey of global fund managers.

But stock buybacks are one of the only things that has been propping up the stock market.  The only way for the bubble to continue is for corporations to go into dizzying amounts of debt in order to fund massive stock buybacks, because the Federal Reserve clearly does not intend to support the markets right now.

At least for the short-term, the Federal Reserve could have calmed the markets and encouraged economic activity by leaving interest rates alone.

In the end, they decided not to do that, and that makes one wonder what they are really trying to achieve.

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The Fed Is Expected To Raise Interest Rates In Spite Of Stock Market Stumbling

Mac Slavo
December 19th, 2018

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By Mac Slavo
December 19th, 2018

The United States’ central bank, the Federal Reserve, is expected to raise interest rates again, in spite of a stock market that’s been stumbling and on track for the worst December since the Great Depression.

According to NPR, the Fed last raised rates in September. Since then, the U.S. economy has given off mixed signals. The job market remains strong, with unemployment at the lowest level in nearly 50 years and economic growth clocked in at a solid 3.5 percent in the third quarter. But the stock market is stumbling and home sales and car sales have slumped because of the higher interest rates. Not to mention the ongoing trade tensions between the United States and China which have led to growing fears about the outlook for the global economy.

President Donald Trump has even taken to Twitter to announce the Fed’s plan to hike interest rates again.

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The decision to raise the interest rate will affect the rates on all kinds of borrowing, from home mortgages to credit cards. The 30-year mortgage rate in the past year climbed from 3.95 percent to a peak of nearly 5 percent in November, which is a seven-year high. It has since dropped to 4.63 percent, still higher than most borrowers would want.

Trump also called the Fed the “greatest threat” in October in an interview with Fox Business, and has singled out Fed chairman Jerome Powell for harsh criticisms., of which the central bank is in desperate need of. The Fed is answerable to no one and usually insulated from political pressure. Presidents in recent times, including Trump’s predecessors, Barack Obama, and George W. Bush, have refrained from overtly criticizing the central bank, probably because they collude with the government for economic destruction.

Meanwhile, Powell has said that the economic outlook remains solid and that interest rates are nearly within a “neutral” range which seems to be indicating that the Fed may not be immediately worried about any inflation. “Interest rates are still low by historical standards,” he said in November.

Stock prices have fallen sharply since early November and it is somewhat rare for the Fed to raise rates in the face of a sustained market selloff. So there’s an outside chance the Fed could change course and pull a stunner by keeping rates steady at the Wednesday meeting.

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