Federal Reserve announces big interest rate cut (CNN) — The Federal Reserve cut interest rates for the first time in the Biden era on Wednesday after the White House spent the last three years grappling with Americans’ dissatisfaction with the cost of living, raising new questions about the health of the economy and the impact on voters at the ballot box. The move is fresh vindication for President Joe Biden, whose pandemic-era agenda ushered in trillions of dollars in government spending — which, when coupled with strong demand for goods, supply chain snarls and Russia’s war with Ukraine — drove inflation to a four-decade high. The half-percentage-point cut could indicate the elusive “soft landing” — experts’ favored term for raising borrowing costs to slow the economic activity while avoiding severe joblessness — has been reached. Biden, who has publicly touted the Fed’s policy independence, will speak at the Economic Club of Washington, D.C., on Thursday and likely tout an economy that’s come full circle in four years. But the rate cut could also suggest the economy, which is showing signs of stress, is in need of a jolt. Although most mainstream economists agree a recession is not around the corner, they also suggest the economy is not out of the woods yet. With less than 50 days until Election Day, another question has emerged: Will it matter to voters? Nevada real estate agent Zoila Sanchez told CNN’s John King that lower interest rates would bring welcome relief to residents looking to buy a house or refinance. “Prices are extremely high, the highest they’ve ever been,” Sanchez told King. “The affordability is not there for everyday people.” Homebuyers taking out a mortgage and homeowners who refinance could see their monthly payments drop. In fact, they already have – mortgages are based on bond yields, which have fallen in recent weeks in anticipation of a rate cut. Borrowing for cars and carrying credit card balances will also eventually become cheaper. And, if the Fed pursues a larger cut, the stock market could rise further from record highs it’s been setting this week – impacting the retirement accounts of Americans with 401(k) plans and the portfolios of the smaller share of Americans who own stocks. But most economists say the effects will be muted or delayed, pointing to the moves the market already made when Powell telegraphed in August that rate cuts were coming. Mortgage rates began falling then. Financial markets touched and remain near record highs. According to Jason Furman, former President Barack Obama’s onetime chief economist, it could take well into 2025 for any cut to spur broad changes in economic behavior. “It’s barely going to affect any aspect of the economy before Election Day,” Furman told CNN. “It’s already priced into the market, and it’s way too soon to affect something like unemployment, GDP or inflation.” Data crunched by the St. Louis Federal Reserve shows that it takes at least nine months for higher interest rates to contract economic activity and, in response, lower prices. And it takes roughly 12 months before lower interest rates are felt by consumers. And some historical data indicates voters already made up their minds on the economy months ago. President George H. W. Bush enjoyed 5.8% economic growth in the three months immediately preceding Election Day. But unemployment had peaked at a troubling 7.8% in June 1992, a concern that – along with Democrat Bill Clinton’s “It’s the economy, stupid” tagline – led voters to ditch Bush and elect Clinton. Aaron Klein, a senior fellow in economics at the Brookings Institution, said some voters have given Vice President Kamala Harris a slight poll bump on her handling of the economy because they didn’t want to support Biden or Trump’s policies. “The key metric for incumbent vote share is how voters felt in April, May, June,” Klein told CNN. “Voters’ mindset about the Biden-Harris administration is already baked.” Still, both sides of the aisle have shown that they think lower rates could help consumers – and ultimately voters – who have been beset by high costs for a long time. Democratic Sens. Elizabeth Warren, John Hickenlooper and Sheldon Whitehouse this week called for the Fed to cut rates even deeper with a three-quarter-point cut to spur more borrowing. And Biden, who has taken pains to point to the Fed’s independence from the executive branch, said this spring he believed a rate cut was warranted. Steve Moore, an economic adviser to former President Donald Trump, said the economy merits a quarter-point cut but believes the Fed should have done it sooner. “They waited three years to do this, why are they doing it on the eve of the election?” Several members of Trump’s team believe the central bank is putting its thumb on the scale in the race, juicing the economy under a Democratic administration to make voters feel better about their finances as they head to the ballot box. Powell, asked in July whether the Fed could remain apolitical if it opted to cut rates in September, was emphatic that it could. “This is my fourth presidential election at the Fed,” Powell said. “Anything we do before, during, or after the election, will be based on the data, the outlook, and the balance of risks.” Trump said in an August news conference that he believes the Fed acts on a “gut feeling” and that a president “should have some say” in how the Fed acts. He later backed off that stance. Moore told CNN that Trump doesn’t necessarily want the Fed to be more closely tied to the White House but does want there to be more transparency behind the central bank’s decision-making. In a second term, Trump could call for regular audits and real-time disclosures, rather than weekslong delays before minutes are published from the closed-door sessions. “There should be C-SPAN cameras in every meeting,” Moore said. The Fed just announced a jumbo-sized interest rate cut The Federal Reserve slashed interest rates aggressively Wednesday, announcing the first rate cut since March 2020. The bold, but not unexpected, half-point move paves the way for lower borrowing costs on everything from mortgages to credit cards. It marks a crucial milestone for the central bank’s historic inflation fight, which kept rates at a bruising 23-year high for more than a year. The decision to cut by half a point, which wasn’t unanimous, telegraphs to the world that central bankers feel a sense of urgency to provide the U.S. economy with swift relief from elevated borrowing costs, considering there were blaring calls in recent days for the Fed to kick off the rate-cutting cycle with a bang. Fed Governor Michelle Bowman, who has frequently expressed worries about lingering price pressures, was the lone dissenter, backing a quarter-point cut instead. Fed officials also penciled in more rate cuts by year’s end in their latest economic forecasts, compared to the single cut in 2024 that they projected in June. Central bankers also expect unemployment to rise higher this year to 4.4%, up from the current rate of 4.2% as of August. Despite the Fed’s aggressive action on Wednesday, the central bank’s inflation battle, in the face of immense pressure from Wall Street and politicians, seems to be paying off so far: Inflation is substantially below the 40-year highs seen in the summer of 2022 — all without a recession. The momentous progress seen since then isn’t solely due to higher interest rates, but also because of the U.S. economy’s gradual recovery from severe pandemic disruptions. The Fed has indeed walked a fine line in taming price pressures without sacrificing America’s job market, an extremely difficult task because rate hikes function by deliberately cooling the economy. That tool wielded by the Fed is typically described as a sledgehammer, not a scalpel. Still, despite inflation receding, jitters remain, mostly centered around the job market’s future now, rather than the possibility of inflation getting stuck or reigniting. That’s precisely why some called for the Fed to start cutting rates aggressively. The unemployment rate ratcheted up relatively quickly over the past year, though from an unusually low point. Economists have widely said that whenever unemployment begins to rise, it tends to catch momentum and keep rising. That has put into jeopardy a possible soft landing for the U.S. economy — a scenario in which inflation is tamed without a sharp increase in unemployment. Such an outcome has only happened once in modern history, in the mid-1990s, so the Fed is within reach of a historic achievement. Is the Fed playing catch-up? The Fed faced pressure to start cutting rates in July, but did not. Some investors and economists pointed to rising unemployment and how the job market can sometimes take a turn for the worse on a dime. The central bank was still waiting for enough evidence that inflation had come under control, but Fed Chair Jerome Powell had said a weakening job market could speed up the timing of the first rate cut. The pace of the job market’s slowdown seems to have done the trick. But it also begs the question: Should the Fed have cut rates in July? Clearly, some investors believe the Fed is behind the curve and the decision to cut rates by half a point fueled that fire even more. It’s a tricky predicament for the Fed, and even the fact that the decision wasn’t unanimous casts even more doubt over the soundness of the Fed’s decision-making. “When will investors think the Fed is ahead of the curve and proactively exercising its ‘put’? This is the most important question because investors have been implicitly asking that — and hoping for this outcome — all summer long,” Jason Draho, head of asset allocation, CIO Americas, at UBS Financial Services, said in a recent analyst note. He added that the Fed’s commitment to extending the U.S. economy’s expansion with so-called “insurance cuts” to prevent a recession is key for investors’ confidence.