WSJ Fedwatcher Jon Hilsenrath is out with his take on the FOMC minutes and highlights concern about overseas markets.
Federal Reserve officials saw economic turbulence abroad as a significant risk to the U.S. economy when they met in December, but they looked past those concerns in part because they expect policy makers abroad to respond with new growth-inducing measures.
“While some participants had lowered their assessments of the prospects for global economic growth, several noted that the likelihood of further responses by policy makers abroad had increased,” minutes of the Fed’s Dec. 16-17 policy meeting showed.
Overall, he concludes that Fed officials mostly dismissed the worries and some are optimistic about the outlook. He cites this portion of the minutes:
“Several participants, pointing to indicators of consumer and business confidence as well as to the solid record of payroll employment gains in 2014, suggested that the real economy may end up showing more momentum than anticipated, while a few others thought that the boost to domestic spending coming from lower energy prices could turn out to be quite large.”
