“Household spending appears to be rising more quickly,” the Federal Open Market Committee said. The Federal Open Market Committee said in a statement in Washington, hours after a government report showed gross domestic product barely grew in the first quarter that according to Bloomberg News, growth “has picked up recently.”
A New York-based economist at Standard Chartered Plc., Thomas Costerg, said that “Tapering is on autopilot.” Thomas Costerg reported that according to Bloomberg News, “You need a much bigger swing in the data to stop tapering and much more weakness than just a 0.1 percent print on GDP.”
According to the Fed, it will consider a “wide range of information” in deciding when to raise the benchmark federal funds rate, or the cost of overnight loans among banks, according to a report by Bloomberg Business Week. A senior economist at Wells Fargo Securities LLC in Charlotte, North Carolina, Mark Vitner, said that “The Fed is saying you have to look past the weak GDP numbers and we are past that now.”
Fed Chair Janet Yellen said in a speech to the Economic Club of New York that, according to Bloomberg News, “the larger the shortfall of employment or inflation from their respective objectives, and the slower the projected progress toward those objectives, the longer the current target range for the federal funds rate is likely to be maintained.”
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