A Surprising Story From CNN

9/17/26 CNN:

The bond market gave the Federal Reserve an ultimatum: Raise rates, or we will.

 So the Fed did the only thing it could do. Backed into a corner by rising Treasury yields and inflation, the central bank boosted its target interest rate Wednesday for the first time since 2023.

Americans have suffered from a persistent inflation problem for five years, and an interest rate hike is a powerful weapon that could help squash it. But it’s a blunt tool that comes with a nasty side effect: It can unintentionally turn the job market into collateral damage.

Still, for Fed Chairman Kevin Warsh & Co., this isn’t any ordinary inflation problem. It’s mainly a result of high energy prices caused by the war with Iran, and as my colleague Matt Egan noted in July: Warsh can’t reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

So the bond market got its wish Wednesday, and the reasonably strong job market and robust consumer spending probably gave the Fed enough room for error.

But the Fed is playing with fire. Raising interest rates risks slowing down the American economy without anything to show for it.
‘Weak case’

Before the Fed decision, some prominent economists were already on its case.

Goldman Sachs economists suggested in a note to clients this week that the case for a rate hike was “weak,” based on the state of the US economy. They argued the economy wasn’t overheating, demand wasn’t excessive, and the supply shocks fueling inflation – namely high oil and fuel prices – would correct themselves once the war ended.

It’s not that the Iran war and Ukraine’s attacks on Russian diesel refineries are part of the problem; they are the problem – all of it, Goldman’s economists said....

The Fed typically “looks through” supply shocks because they’re temporary and rate hikes are ineffective at combatting them. And once they fix themselves, the Fed may find that interest rates now are too high, artificially raising borrowing costs for businesses and consumers without actually tackling inflation.

“The Fed cannot control energy prices,” said Michael Pearce, chief US economist at Oxford Economics. “The economy is solid and can withstand a few rate hikes, but the risk is higher interest rates begin to weaken the labor market.”

Other discussions of the hike are also interesting. 9/17/26 CBS News:

Warsh, who was named by President Trump to succeed longtime Fed Chair Jerome Powell earlier this year, has previously vowed to tackle inflation. But economists had been unsure of his commitment to that goal, given that he had also echoed some of Mr. Trump's views that the economy could benefit from lower interest rates.

What changed? Between the time Warsh was nominated in January and this week's Fed meeting, inflation has sharply accelerated, driven largely by the Iran war's impact on global oil prices.

In January, consumer prices were rising at an annual rate of 2.4%, within touching distance of the Fed's 2% target. But soaring crude prices have reversed that progress, sending the Consumer Price Index to a three-year high of 4.2% in May. While inflation has eased slightly since then, dipping to 3.4% in August, it's still far higher than Fed officials like.

"The plain fact is that inflation is too high, and has been for too long," Warsh said in a press conference after the Fed announced the rate hike on Wednesday, stressing that the Fed wants to take a "timelier" approach to curb price increases.

Those comments were interpreted as pointing to "higher rates for longer," Jaison Davis, economic research analyst at GlobalData, said in a report. "The bar for easing [rates] is now much higher, and it rests on clear evidence that inflation is heading back to target."
The Iran war is complicating life for the Fed

Warsh pointed to the impact of the war in Iran as one reason Fed officials were unanimous on the need to hike interest rates. The conflict, which has no end in sight, has severely reduced the flow of oil out of the Persian Gulf, while an escalation in fighting between Saudi Arabia and the Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen threatens another vital waterway.

Crude oil prices have jumped above $100 a barrel in recent weeks. The price increase has pushed fuel costs higher for Americans, who paid a record-high $6.40 per gallon for diesel on Thursday, a 73% jump from a year ago. Gasoline reached $4.44 a gallon, 38% higher than a year earlier, according to AAA data.

  9/17/26 Barron's:

The Federal Reserve has spent more than five years promising the American public that policymakers will bring inflation sustainably back to the central bank’s 2% annual target. On Sept. 16 the Fed raised interest rates in pursuit of that goal.

John Cochrane, a prominent economist and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, thinks that higher rates are a short-term solution, at best. His research suggests that inflation will resume climbing unless fiscal policy also changes and the U.S. brings its borrowing and spending under control. Without more restrictive fiscal policy, he says, the Fed can only rearrange inflation in the face of a mountain of federal debt that recently surpassed $40 trillion. That’s because higher rates push up the government’s interest costs, leading to higher inflation in the long run.

Cochrane, previously a professor of finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, has laid out these and other ideas in his popular blog, The Grumpy Economist He spoke with Barron’s on Sept. 11 about his economic research, the U.S. Treasury’s buyback of longer-dated debt, and the changes that Fed Chairman Kevin Warsh is implementing. An edited version of the conversation follows.

All of this makes sense. The Fed is legally obligated to keep inflation and unemployment balanced. This is at best a "threading the eye of the needle" problem at best; the insane deficits make this nearly impossible. The big gorilla in the room on interest rates is federal borrowing. If the U.S. government cannot control its borrowing, it will push out other borrowers, raising interest rates. Somehow, Congress will need to address this problem. At some point, pursuing Medicare/Medicaid/COVID fraud will make a difference but not quickly.