Fed: one last one (tightening) for the road

Since the meeting in mid-June, when the Fed left its monetary policy unchanged, Jerome Powell and his colleagues have repeatedly said that the cycle of rate hikes was not over. A further rate hike, the eleventh since March 2022, is widely expected on 26 July. Given the recent data, the Fed is in the process of calming inflation without triggering an uptick in unemployment. There have been other cases of soft landings in US economic history (in 1994, for example), but after signif...