Fed to Publish Interest Rate Forecasts Starting This Month

The Federal Reserve said Tuesday it will began to release policymaker forecasts of future monetary policy later this month.

The decision to move towards more transparency was made in December, but wasn't known to the public until Tuesday afternoon, when the Fed published its Dec. 13 meeting minutes.

Projections for the federal funds rate will be incorporated into the quarterly economic forecasts. The first forecast is due after the Fed's Jan. 24-25 meeting.

The minutes said most participants agreed that adding their projections of the target federal funds rate to the economic projections would help the public better understand the Committee's monetary policy decisions.

However, a few others expressed concern that publishing information about participants' individual policy projections could confuse the public.

For example, they saw an appreciable risk that the public could mistakenly interpret participants' projections of the target federal funds rate as signaling the Committee's intention to follow a specific policy path rather than as indicating members' conditional projections for the federal funds rate given their expectations regarding future economic developments, the minutes said.

Most participants viewed these concerns as manageable and several noted that participants would have opportunities to explain their projections and policy views in speeches and other forms of communication.

Nonetheless, some participants did not see providing policy projections as a useful step at this time.