Inflation Pressures Are Easing but Rate Cut Forecast Remains Uncertain

The New Year is beginning where the old one ended -- with uncertainty about when – or whether – the Federal Reserve will begin cutting interest rates.

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It appears that financial institutions are not “going gentle” into the night.  They are railing big time against the darkness descending on the industry in the form of new regulations that threaten to slash the income from credit cards and overdraft fees. 

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It looks like a stalemate – again - on regulatory reform, as another effort to craft a bipartisan agreement on a Senate bill appears to have crashed and burned.

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The continued flow of improving economic reports is making analysts more optimistic about the outlook and more confident that the recovery is sustainable.

"We have seen increased evidence that a self-sustaining recovery in consumer and business spending may be taking hold," Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke told a Congressional committee last month – enough evidence to produce more upbeat statements, such as this, but not enough to reverse the Fed’s decision to purchase an additional $600 billion in government bonds to boost the speed and strength of the recovery.

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If you think of economic analysis as a footrace between positive and negative news, the positives pulled ahead of the negatives last month. But that doesn’t seem to have altered the contest in the economic forecasting arena, where economists predicting that the fledgling recovery will stumble under the weight of high unemployment and weak home sales are running pretty much neck-and-neck with those who think the recovery has the “legs” to make it sustainable, if not robust.