Part 2/7:
Interestingly, during this announcement, two members of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) dissented, voting against the chairman’s stance. Such dissenting votes are rare — the last time this occurred was in 1993, underscoring the unusual nature of this decision. The chair, Jerome Powell, expressed concern about inflation, suggesting that trade policies like tariffs might contribute to rising prices. However, critics argue that tariffs do not increase the money supply and therefore cannot directly cause inflation. Instead, tariffs tend to cause selective increases in prices for certain imported goods, which can lead to shifts in consumer demand but do not constitute inflation in the traditional monetary sense.