연준의 인플레이션 고민, 이란과의 분쟁 전부터 시작

Early on in the war with Iran, Jerome H. Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve, seemed vexed about the state of inflation after the central bank’s prolonged battle to try to tame it.

Overall consumer price growth, based on the Fed’s preferred gauge, had in the past year made little progress toward its 2 percent target. Another closely watched metric, tracking inflation in services such as transportation and personal care, had also barely budged, sitting well above its 20-year average of 2.7 percent.

“It’s frustrating,” Mr. Powell told reporters at a news conference last month. The Fed, which had been wrestling with elevated price pressures for five years, needed to see progress on a multitude of fronts to feel confident about its grip on inflation, he said. Mr. Powell warned that without that, additional interest rate cuts would be hard to justify.

That backdrop adds a layer of complexity to the Fed’s decision-making on rates as it stares down an energy shock stemming from the war in the Middle East. Officials maintain that there is no urgency to move rates from their range of 3.5 percent to 3.75 percent, especially given heightened uncertainty around the war’s resolution with a shaky cease-fire in place. But the longer the Fed misses on its inflation target, the more intense the pressure will be to address it.

“If a policymaker comes and tells you a story every six months about why they didn’t achieve the inflation goal, I think they start to lose credibility with the public,” said James Bullard, dean of Purdue’s business school and former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

Economists typically expect energy-related shocks to have a short-lived economic impact that fades as prices retreat. A rule of thumb is that a 10 percent increase in oil prices will raise the Personal Consumption Expenditures price index, the Fed’s preferred gauge of inflation, by 0.2 percentage points. What’s known as core inflation, which strips out volatile food and energy prices, will increase by 0.04 percentage points.

Monthly inflation data to be released on Thursday is expected to show that before the war, overall P.C.E. inflation rose 0.4 percent and maintained a 2.8 percent annual clip. Core inflation is projected to have steadied at 3 percent after another 0.4 percent increase in February.

In the weeks since that February survey period, oil prices have shot higher. Until Tuesday’s cease-fire, Brent crude, the international benchmark, had gained roughly 50 percent since the start of the war. It traded around $95 a barrel on Wednesday, still roughly 35 percent higher than its prewar level.

Gasoline costs have surged higher as a result, with Americans paying roughly 40 percent more to fill up their cars than before the war. Shipping costs have also risen, as have jet fuel prices, raising the prospects of higher airfares, as Delta Air Lines warned on Wednesday. And disruptions in the natural gas market have contributed to a global fertilizer shortage that, if sustained, could make groceries costlier.

The impact of these price increases on inflation is expected to be immediate, showing up as early as March’s data.

An extended period of higher energy prices risks compelling companies in other sectors, especially those that have already seen their profit margins eroded as they weathered President Trump’s tariffs, to consider their own cost adjustments.

Prices paid by businesses across the services sector for materials and other inputs increased more in March than they had in roughly 13 years, a nascent sign of inflationary pressures stemming from the war. Input prices also surged for manufacturing companies, notching the highest level since the peak of the postpandemic inflation surge in June 2022.

For the most part, Fed officials do not expect energy-related price pressures to significantly alter the outlook for underlying inflation. John C. Williams, president of the New York Fed, said on Tuesday that “the story hasn’t changed very much.”

But policymakers know they cannot afford to dismiss the threat of a more pernicious problem, underscoring their tenuous position after missing their inflation target for so long.

Economists point to two major drivers for the stubborn inflation. The first revolves around an assessment of just how restrictive rates are — meaning how much borrowing costs are weighing on economic activity. Last month, Mr. Powell described the Fed’s current policy settings, after rate cuts in 2024 and 2025, as “somewhere around the borderline between restrictive and not.”

But the economy’s resilience throughout the litany of policy changes in the past year, from tariffs to immigration restrictions, has raised questions about what constitutes a “neutral” rate that neither speeds up growth nor slows it down. As of projections released last month, most Fed officials place it around 3.1 percent. If the neutral rate is higher than that, however, current policy settings may not be doing much to keep a lid on inflation.

“By cutting rates 1.75 percentage points over the last two years, the Fed contributed to a policy that was not particularly restrictive and therefore allowed inflation to grow,” said Marc Giannoni, chief U.S. economist at Barclays. He added that the Fed might have been in a slightly better position had it not reduced rates by as much.

“It would have been preferable to have started the year with slightly lower inflation, even at the cost of potentially slightly weaker growth,” Mr. Giannoni said.

How much policymakers should be restraining the economy depends in large part on the public’s perception about future inflation. The Fed wants to ensure that people do not lose faith in its ability to get inflation back down to 2 percent over time. If they do, and expectations about inflation over a longer horizon shift higher, that can make it significantly harder for the central bank to reach its goal.

Some economists point to these expectations as another reason inflation has stayed high. The Fed pays closest attention to measures of financial activity that track expectations beyond one year. Short-term measures, especially those based on surveys, tend to be highly volatile. Three-, five- or 10-year metrics are instead favored.

Anna L. Paulson, president of the Philadelphia Fed, recently described long-term inflation expectations as “a little more fragile,” even as they remained “consistent with 2 percent." Short-term measures, meanwhile, have shot higher, leading Michael S. Barr, a Fed governor, to call for the central bank to be “especially vigilant.”

Disagreement among survey respondents about expected inflation is still relatively elevated, according to data from Ricardo Reis, an economist at the London School of Economics. Companies also seem to be resetting prices more frequently, Fed research shows. Taking those developments together, Mr. Reis said, “The energy shock comes at a critical time to test whether expectations are anchored.”

Yuriy Gorodnichenko, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, said the Fed’s rate decisions in the coming months would determine the outcome of this test. If the Fed holds rate steady and price pressures build, the “real,” inflation-adjusted rate will fall, passively loosening the policy settings.

No Fed official has so far called for a rate increase, but a growing cohort now appears open to the idea of one if inflation stays too elevated for too long, minutes from the central bank’s March meeting showed.

“The question is not how households and firms could expect inflation of 4 to 5 percent over the next several years,” Olivier Coibion, an economist at the University of Texas at Austin, wrote recently with Mr. Gorodnichenko. “Given what they have experienced, what they are observing in energy markets and what they are hearing from the Fed, the more pointed question is: How could they expect anything else?”

Colby Smith covers the Federal Reserve and the U.S. economy for The Times.