“Economic projections prepared by Federal Reserve Board staff as background for the June 16-17, 2015, meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) were inadvertently included in a computer file posted to the Board’s public website on June 29”.
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The forecasts do not represent the views of the central bankers who set America’s interest rate policy.
Friday’s disclosure comes two years after central bank officials accidentally released the Federal Open Market Committee minutes to bank lobbyists and congressional staff, raising questions about the Fed’s internal controls.
In addition to a lower projected rate path, Fed staffers project inflation will stay below the Fed board’s 2% target through 2020.
In April 2013 a member of the Fed’s congressional liaison staff e-mailed a copy of the record to more than 100 people about 19 hours before the minutes were scheduled to be published.
The staff expects policymakers will raise their benchmark interest rate, known as the Fed funds rate, enough for it to average 0.35 percent in the fourth quarter of 2015.
The Fed said Friday that staff projections, prepared every three months, “do not incorporate policymakers’ views, including their views on monetary policy”. The files are being kept online “because the information has already been released”, it said. Instead, bond rates would reach 2.63% in the fourth quarter of this year, 3.14% by the end of 2016 and 4.20% by the end of 2020, according to the projections.
The staff’s forecasts “are clearly below the Fed’s median” forecast for the federal funds rate, said Guy Lebas, managing director at Janney Montgomery Scott LLC in Philadelphia.
The staff prepare projections “based only on publicly available information”, the Fed said.
Because the projections already were made public, the Fed said Friday it was making the information “more easily accessible” on its website.
The Fed said it referred the matter to the central bank’s inspector general’s office.
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The lawmakers want Fed Chairwoman Janet Yellen to giving the committee information about the internal probe of the alleged leak, but she has refused, citing an investigation by the Fed’s inspector general and by the Justice Department. “Another file contained computer code used to generate a table displaying staff economic projections”.
