Hurricane Fallout Could Cloud Picture for Data-Dependent Fed
- Storms will distort economic indicators in coming months
- Policy makers will seek to filter out storms’ impact
Recent U.S. Storms Set to Distort Economic Indicators
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Harvey and Irma probably aren’t going to dent U.S. growth in any lasting way, but back-to-back hurricanes could make it tough for Federal Reserve officials to take the economy’s pulse as they ponder the timing of their next interest-rate hike.
“When we think about the impact of these storms, first of all it’s going to make it very difficult to read the economic data over the next few months because it’s going to be hard to know exactly what the data would have been ex the hurricanes,” William Dudley, president of the New York Fed, told CNBC in an interview Friday.