ECONOMY/FEDERAL RESERVE: “The Federal Reserve showed continued optimism about the U.S. economy in voting Wednesday [12-13-17] to raise short-term interest rates for the third time this year, and signaling it would stay on a similar path next year amid a leadership transition.
Officials nudged their economic-growth estimates higher for the next few years on expectations that congressional Republicans will pass tax cuts. But the Fed policy makers’ new projections suggest the boost wouldn’t be so large that they would have to speed up the pace of rate increases to guard against too much inflation…
The Fed said it would increase its benchmark federal-funds rate Thursday by a quarter percentage point to a range between 1.25% and 1.5%, the fifth such increase in the past two years. Officials penciled in three quarter-point rate increases for next year, as they had in September, and two such increases each in 2019 and 2020.”
-Nick Timiraos, “Fed Raises Rates, Sticks to Forecast for 2018 Increases,” The Wall Street Journal online, Dec. 13, 2017 07:33pm