Thought Of The Week Powell’s Fed Message, Dot Plot, Quadruple Witching The U.S Federal Reserve did nothing unexpected. Fed Chair Jerome Powell continued to project near-zero interest rates at least through 2023 during its March meeting on Wednesday despite the mounting inflation worries in financial markets. Massive fiscal support and widening vaccinations have buoyed expectations that easy credit will overheat the economy such that rate hikes may need to happen sooner than later. However, Powell, who is not an economist, was not unduly concerned by the rising yields and indicated that the Fed would not use economic forecasts to change policy pre-emptively but would want to see actual data instead. The danger with this approach is that real time data is not necessarily correct. The new dot plot of interest rate forecasts submitted by each of Fed’s eighteen policy makers also showed seven officials forecasting a rate increase by...