It is a Federal Reserve “tradition” to not adjust its benchmark interest rates in the final months before an election.
The Federal Reserve has historically left interest rates alone in the months before a presidential election. …
Since 1990 the Fed has cut rates in the final two months of a presidential campaign only three times. Each case shows why rate cutting in the homestretch of the political season is exceptional.
Call it two elections, since two of those three cuts occurred during the same election end game. Still, in these 34 years there are nine Presidential elections. Twice in nine opportunities works out to be a skosh under a quarter of the time, or a skosh over a fifth, depending on one’s perspective. That’s a pretty weak tradition.
More important is this remark by then-Dallas Fed chief Robert McTeer:
[W]e’re within a month of the election…it was conventional wisdom we weren’t supposed to act so close to an election.
Except that a decision to not act is an action itself, and choosing not to act on interest rates when the situation otherwise calls for action has its own influence on an upcoming election.
The Fed should make its interest rate moves when the economic environment says it should, regardless of the politics of the moment. Otherwise, the Fed isn’t acting independently on economics, as its DOC requires it to do, but in active response to politics.