Fed minutes: Most officials worried about inflation moving higher

Source: AP

Updated 3:37 PM EDT, August 20, 2025


WASHINGTON (AP) — Most Federal Reserve officials said last month that the threat of higher inflation was a greater concern than the potential for job losses, leading the central bank to keep its key rate unchanged.

According to the minutes of the July 29-30 meeting, released Wednesday, members of the Fed’s interest-rate setting committee “assessed that the effects of higher tariffs had become more apparent in the prices of some goods but that their overall effects on economic activity and inflation remained to be seen.”

The minutes underscored the reluctance among the majority of the Fed’s 19 policymakers to reduce the central bank’s short-term interest rate until they get a clearer sense of the impact of President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs on inflation. So far inflation has crept up in the past couple of months but hasn’t risen as much as many economists feared when Trump unveiled some of his duties.

The policymakers appeared to spend a substantial amount of time discussing the tariffs, and they said they expected inflation to increase in the coming months as a result. But they also “judged that considerable uncertainty remained about the timing, magnitude, and persistence of the effects of this year’s increase in tariffs.”

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