At the Fed’s press conference, Fed Chair Jerome Powell acknowledged that many consumers are struggling with higher inflation. “We hear loud and clear” the concerns about affordability, Powell said.
But what Powell and the Fed can do about affordability is a different story.
“There’s actually not much they can do about that,” Apollo chief economist Torsten Sløk told Yahoo Finance on Wednesday. (Disclosure: Yahoo Finance is owned by Apollo Global Management.)
Sløk noted that a greater share of consumer spending is going toward basic needs, such as healthcare, housing, and education, all of which have become more expensive in recent years. This has made the Fed’s job more difficult because, in the housing market, for instance, structural factors like low supply are keeping prices high — and somewhat impervious to monetary policy.
“If you begin to see the Fed lower interest rates, that’s probably going to increase home prices even more,” Sløk said. “So in that sense, the Fed doesn’t really have any tools to solve the affordability crisis.”
This sentiment was echoed by Powell, who noted that a quarter-point change in the federal funds rate is not “going to make much of a difference” in the housing market.
More broadly, Powell said, “A lot of [the affordability issue] is not the current rate of inflation. A lot of that is just embedded higher cost due to higher inflation in 2022 and ’23.”
