The Federal Reserve lowered interest rates by a quarter of a percentage point on Wednesday, delivering the long-awaited cut which Powell hinted at last month and President Donald Trump had been hounding him for since he took office.
The decision, like the one made in last month’s meeting, was not unanimously supported. Stephen Miran, Trump’s pick to join the Fed, voted in favor of a half-point reduction.
Still, Powell emerged with more unity than some expected. “We really saw Powell corral the cats here,” Diane Swonk, chief economist at KPMG, told Fortune. “We didn’t get three dissents, we only got one dissent. That was a major victory for the chairman.”
The first cut since December, the decision punctuates growing concerns about a dramatically slowed labor market and the increasingly fraught and unusual politics surrounding the central bank.
