Inflation Falls Further Below the Fed's Target: Why Raise Rates?

Both the overall and core deflators for personal consumption expenditures (PCE) fell in March. This brought the change in the core PCE deflator over the last year down to 1.6 percent. The Fed officially targets a 2.0 percent as an average rate. This means that it wants inflation to occasionally be above 2.0 percent in order to average out the times when it is below 2.0 percent. That should mean that it would want to see the inflation rate accelerate slightly to meet this target.

The Fed is w...