Fed raises interest rates for first time in three years

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Fed chair presided over unanimous decision to raise interest rates despite intense campaign from White House

In the end, Kevin Warsh’s Federal Reserve acquitted itself well. For all the uncertainty he had sparked at the previous meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee, when he refused to provide any indication of what he was prepared to do to tame stubborn inflation, the chair on Wednesday presided over a unanimous decision to raise interest rates for the first time in three years.

“Today’s action starts to show that we’re serious about this,” he said at the press conference after the meeting, with “this” meaning inflation in excess of the Fed’s 2% target for over five years. Welcome though it was, his embrace of economic orthodoxy nonetheless did little to dispel the Keystone Cops quality of governance in Donald Trump’s US.

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