Nothing is certain about a US interest rate hike.

Washington (EFE).– Him President of the US Central Bank (Fed) Jerome Powellhe clarified that the body has not yet made a decision on how much interest rates will rise and that various economic data are awaited.

“We have some potentially important data to analyze (…) Once again, We have not made any decision about the meeting in March, nor will we. until we see additional data,” he said at a hearing before a committee of the United States House of Representatives.

The next meeting of the Fed’s Open Market Committee, which must make a decision on interest rates, will be held in between March 21 and 22.

That’s how Powell qualified the words he spoke before the Senate on Tuesday the first of two appearances she must offer to the cameras every six months by mandate inform them about the monetary policy implemented by the regulator.

In his opening address to the Senate, Powell said that “if the overall data shows that faster tightening is warranted, we would be prepared to accelerate the pace of rate increases,” words that were interpreted as exchange rate acceleration notice and this caused the market to fluctuate, with major indexes falling.

He repeated the same speech, but when he got to that part, he introduced the sentence: “And I emphasize that we still don’t have the data”a clarification he insisted on during question time.

In order to reduce inflation, The Fed has carried out a series of rate hikes, eight since a year ago. The last one happened on February 1 and was lower than the previous ones, by 0.25 points.

With this increase, the rates were in the range of 4.5% and 4.75%the highest number since September 2007.

From peaking in June (9.1%) in 2022. inflation in the United States fell to 6.4% in January.when it fell for the seventh month in a row, albeit only by a tenth, a rate of decline that is too slow, according to the Fed.