Fed Officials are now thinking about pushing for a fresh monetary stimulus that would combine guidance on the provisional scale of a new program and a time frame for buying assets with the flexibility to adjust its size at regular meetings.
Fed officials are evaluating an approach that allows more discretionary meeting-by-meeting decisions than the unconditional “shock and awe” stimulus it launched during the crisis in 2008 and 2009. But no decision has been made to launch a new round of quantitative easing yet.
The US central bank is considering a return to buying assets as the unemployment rate remains stubbornly high at 9.6% and core inflation of about 1% is below the Fed’s goal of about 2%.