The Fed has often moved interest rates by 0.75 percentage point or more in recent decades. But until this week, it had always done so in a downward direction. Indeed, it was a hallmark of Fed policy that it always cut interest rates faster, with less prompting, than it raised them.
This was rooted in a doctrine that former Chairman Alan Greenspan dubbed “risk management.” The Fed must decide where the greatest risks lie and then err on the side of doing too much to minimize those risks—cut off the tails of the distribution, in statistics-speak.
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