The Federal Reserve elected to increase interest rates during its March meeting for the first time in 2018, but it’s far from done raising rates for the year, or so says a note Goldman Sachs sends to its clients.
In the note, authored by Goldman Sachs Chief Economist of Investment Bank Jan Hatzius, he explained the company forecasts the Federal Open Markets Committee will continue to raise interest rates once each quarter until 2019.
The company forecasted the federal funds rate will rise to a terminal funds rate of 3.25% to 3.5%.
“At this point, the only difference between our view and the median FOMC dot is one of timing, but we remain significantly more hawkish than market pricing, especially for 2019 and beyond,” Hatzius wrote in the report.
In its report, Goldman Sachs also estimated the economy’s true growth rate currently hovers around 3%.
“As fiscal stimulus becomes more clearly visible in the data and seasonal/weather distortions reverse, we expect the Q2 GDP and payroll numbers to confirm that growth is still well above trend,” the report stated.
The report estimates inflation will rise to 1.9% in March. It also increased it’s yearly forecast to 2% by the end of the year and to 2.2% in 2019 and 2020.
“Although this forecast is part of a tightly bunched consensus—in fact, the dispersion of inflation views in forecaster surveys is just about the lowest on record—one should not underestimate the uncertainty around it,” Hatzius wrote in the report.
“Even in the low-inflation environment of the past couple of decades, the average absolute error around year-ahead core PCE forecasts—using the Fed staff as a best-in-class example—has been a sizable 0.4pp,” he continued. “If our forecast is a reasonable description of the central case, this suggests a material risk of a more significant overshoot to the 2½%+ range.”
