The elusive Fed 'soft landing' nears. Why are Americans so mad about the economy?
U.S. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said emphatically last week that people «hate inflation, hate it,» but he left another fact unspoken — they also punish the politicians in charge when prices rise.
The central bank's quest for a "soft landing" of more slowly rising prices and continued economic growth looks increasingly probable.
In fact, the U.S. may hit a sweet spot just as the 2024 presidential election campaign crescendos next year.
It's the sort of benign outcome that academic studies and high-ranking economists had called virtually impossible after inflation hit 40-year highs in June of 2022.
Some warned that millions of workers might need to be rendered jobless to reduce the pace of price increases in a flashback to the central banking experience of the 1970s.
Rather than cheering, though, after years of economic turbulence since the coronavirus pandemic erupted in 2020, Americans grumble, at least if you ask them about the economy.
More than 40% of U.S. voters who backed Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election say they think the economy is worse off than it was then, a Reuters/Ipsos poll published last month found.
The front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, former President Donald Trump, faces a string of criminal indictments related to his attempts to overturn the 2020 election.
Still, several recent polls show him tied with Biden in a hypothetical 2024 matchup.
That's because things on the ground don't feel as good as the positive inflation trend would indicate. With fast rising prices and the end of an array of pandemic-era government benefit programs, inflation-adjusted household income fell last year, and the poverty rate increased.
Borrowing costs also have risen sharply in the
