New York
CNN Business
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Wide leg jeans, butterfly clips and half-point rate increases: The 1990s are back.
Earlier this month Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell announced a half-percentage-piont increase in interest rates, the largest hike in over two decades. Powell also indicated that he wouldn’t hesitate to do it again — a move straight out of the central bank’s 1994 playbook, when the Fed last tempered the US economy and successfully executed a so-called soft landing.
In the 12 months that followed February 1994, the Fed, under former Chair Alan Greenspan, nearly doubled interest rates to 6% in just seven hikes, including two half-point increases and one three-quarter-point hike.
“Eat your heart out, 1994,” wrote Morgan Stanley analysts in a note following Powell’s comments.
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