Fed still wants easy money and any rate increases will be trivial

By Steve Matthews and Jeanna Smialek
Bloomberg News
Tuesday, April 21, 2015

Janet Yellen wants you to know that while the era of zero rates may be drawing to a close, money will stay cheap for a long time to come.

The Federal Reserve chair and her colleagues have stressed in recent speeches that monetary policy will remain unusually easy after they begin to tighten this year for the first time in almost a decade. They are telling investors that the pace of increases is more important than the liftoff date.

"This should be the slowest tightening cycle since the funds rate became the policy instrument of choice" in 1982, said Roberto Perli, a former Fed official who is now a partner at Cornerstone Macro LLC in Washington.

Policy makers have ruled out an increase at the next meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee, April 28-29. New York Fed President William C. Dudley stressed on Monday that once they start to lift rates above zero, "we will simply be moving from an extremely accommodative monetary policy to one that is only slightly less so." ...

... For the remainder of the report:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-04-21/fed-plays-down-liftoff...