Fed Meeting News Today: What Will Powell & Co. Say About Interest Rate Cuts Amid Rising Recession Fears?

Here’s what to watch at one of the most complicated Fed meetings in months

Life’s what happens when you’re busy making other plans. That might as well be Fed Chair Jerome Powell’s slogan for the Fed’s March interest rate decision, expected today at 2 p.m. ET. 

At their most recent meeting in January, policymakers were so close to the elusive “soft landing” of the U.S. economy — Fed code for cooling inflation without pushing the economy into a recession. Inflation was still high but had massively improved. Joblessness had risen only modestly. Most important to economic growth, consumers kept spending. Fed officials said the U.S. economy was in a good place, which was allowing them to proceed patiently with future rate cuts. 

Then came an abundance of downside risks, largely from policy uncertainties surrounding President Donald Trump’s new administration. The chief executive has threatened, imposed, then later removed several batches of tariffs on some of the U.S.’s largest trading partners. He’s also cracked down on immigration and moved to curtail federal spending by laying off workers at government agencies. 

The Fed is widely expected to leave interest rates alone today. Yet, if you’re tuning in to today’s decision, you’ll probably want to pay close attention to whether the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) still says the economy is in a “solid” place. And you’ll want to remember a very important lesson when it comes to personal finance: Tune out the noise, and stay focused on the big picture. 

Here’s what’s most important to watch:

• Will Fed officials signal higher unemployment and inflation in the year ahead? Economists say tariffs could push prices higher while also weighing on business investment, profitability and growth. If policymakers expect unemployment to increase, economic growth to slow and inflation to simultaneously rise, you might start to hear a dirty word tossed around: “stagflation.” 
• Speaking of stagflation, what will Chair Powell say about it? The last time Powell was asked about stagflation concerns in May 2024, he lightened the mood with a quip: “I don’t see the ‘stag nor the ‘flation.” But that was before Trump’s trade war heated up.
• Will the Fed pencil in any more rate cuts? If inflation rises but so does unemployment, the next big question is what the Fed will prioritize. Thankfully, the Fed is set to update its Summary of Economic Projections, which can give you some pretty good clues. In its last estimates from December, the Fed signaled that it planned to cut interest rates just twice in 2025. More cuts could signal growth fears, while fewer cuts could suggest inflation concerns. 

To learn how the Fed might respond to those conflicting concerns, I recently caught up with Erica Groshen, the former commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics and vice president of research at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Here’s what she had to say: “Without the inflationary pressures, the Fed would probably act very quickly to reduce rates. With the inflationary pressures, they would probably wait a little bit longer” to cut, she said.

See more of her insights, and read more about what to expect at the Fed’s latest meeting, in my full preview: What to watch at the Fed’s March meeting.