Central Banks Are Split on How Fast to Keep Cutting Rates

Inflation has cooled from its post-pandemic peak, but central bankers remain split on how quickly to keep cutting rates, wary of reigniting price pressures just as they appeared to be under control.

Headline inflation has settled well below its post-pandemic highs across most major economies, giving central banks room to begin unwinding the aggressive rate hikes deployed to fight it. The pace of further cuts, however, remains a genuine point of disagreement among policymakers, split between those eager to support slowing growth and those wary that cutting too quickly could let inflation re-accelerate before it’s fully tamed.

Labor markets have cooled from their tightest post-pandemic levels but haven’t cracked outright, giving policymakers a genuinely ambiguous signal rather than a clear mandate to move quickly in either direction.

Households are feeling the lag

Even as headline inflation has cooled, many households report that the cumulative price increases of recent years haven’t reversed — grocery and housing costs in particular remain well above pre-pandemic levels even as the rate of further increase has slowed, a distinction that shows up clearly in consumer sentiment surveys that remain more pessimistic than the underlying data might suggest.

“Inflation slowing down doesn’t feel like relief when prices are still higher than they were. That gap is doing a lot of the political damage right now.”

Markets are pricing in further gradual rate cuts over the coming year, though officials have repeatedly emphasized that any specific path remains contingent on incoming data rather than a fixed schedule, leaving room for the timeline to shift in either direction as new figures arrive.