The Federal Reserve kept its monetary policy unchanged at its meeting on Wednesday, July 28, and kept interest rates at the current levels of 0.25%, and the bank decided to maintain its purchases of Treasury bonds by $80 billion per month and its purchases of mortgage-backed securities by 40 billion dollars a month.
The statement issued by the bank stressed that the course of the economy still depends on the path of the virus despite the progress in vaccinations, and that risks to the economic outlook still exist, with an emphasis that the committee seeks to achieve the maximum level of employment and stabilize inflation rates at the bank’s target of 2% in the long term.
The Federal Reserve played down the current inflation spikes, as US Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell indicated at the bank’s press conference that the current price pressures are only temporary and will fade with time.
Starting to reduce the bank’s bond purchases process is still unspecified from the Federal Reserve, as the bank confirmed that it has not taken any decision on the timing and that it is still too early to consider raising interest rates as the economy is still far from stable levels and there are still large numbers of The unemployed in addition to rising concerns about the variable delta in the United States of America and the outside world.
So, the US Federal Reserve postpones any decisions regarding the process of starting to reduce the bank’s purchases of assets amounting to 120 billion dollars per month and expresses its concerns about the delta variable, and therefore attention will now turn to the Jackson Hole symposium in August or to the bank’s meeting in September.
The US dollar reacted positively in the initial moments of the decision, to test the general index of the US dollar at 92.70 levels, before declining and ending the session down by 0.20% at 92.25 levels, and it is now trading with the opening of the European markets for today’s session, Thursday, at 92.05 levels, down by 0.20%.
The euro is trading against the US dollar at its highest level in two weeks at 1.1867 levels, while the Japanese yen is trading at 109.84 levels.