It’s not just the Fed. Central banks around the world are meeting this week.
It’s not just the Fed. Central banks around the world are meeting this week.
It is Fed Week. That is, the Federal Reserve’s Federal Open Market Committee will meet Tuesday and Wednesday to update its interest rate policy.
But it’s also European Central Bank Week and Bank of Japan Week. Not to mention the central banks in Chile, Indonesia and a bunch of other countries.
It may be a quirk of the calendar, but there are some busy days ahead in the global macroeconomy.
In fact, central banks in more than 20 countries are meeting this week, but some will, of course, be watched more closely than others. Like the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank.
“Japan’s an important one as well because it’s one of the largest economies,” said Aditi Sahasrabuddhe, an assistant professor of political science at Brown University.
Japan has been holding off on raising rates and is expected to maintain that stance this week.
The Fed is up first. Then the European Central Bank, which makes its decisions independently, but “they certainly will probably be paying a lot more attention to what’s happening this side of the Atlantic than the other way around,” Sahasrabuddhe said.
Also watching the Fed are the central banks in developing countries that are heavily reliant on the dollar.
“So some of the central banks of emerging markets often also have to worry more about financial stability, meaning if the Federal Reserve continues to raise rates, that’s a worry for them,” said Matthias Matthijs, an associate professor at Johns Hopkins.
Because if interest rates go up here, global investors may move their money to the U.S. instead of smaller countries that rely on foreign investment.
“So that probably increases the pressure on them to raise rates as well, so that they can keep broadly their investments at home equally attractive to the United States,” Matthijs said.
But the rate decisions this week may not be the most important takeaways.
“What central bank watchers will really be looking at is what kinds of hints do they get out of the communications that come from Fed [Chair Jerome] Powell, the president of the European Central Bank, Christine Lagarde, as to what they’re likely to do in the fall,” said Ilene Grabel, a professor at the University of Denver’s Josef Korbel School of International Studies.
Because those hints will shape what the rest of the global economy decides to do.
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