(Bloomberg) -- Wall Street’s biggest banks are divided over how fast and deep the Federal Reserve will cut interest rates over the next year, setting the stage for jittery financial markets until the outlook clears.
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Hours after the US central bank surprised most Fed watchers on Wednesday by cutting its benchmark by half a percentage point, economists at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. revised their forecast to show quarter-point reductions at every meeting from November through next June. Peers at JPMorgan Chase & Co., who’d correctly predicted this week’s shift, still see another half-point in November, but say that will depend on the state of the labor market.
In the market, traders are pricing in about 70 basis points worth of easing by the end of the year — and nearly 2 percentage points of rate cuts by next September. That’s more aggressive than the half point of cuts forecast by Fed officials in their latest dot plot by year’s end.
Here’s what economists at some of the biggest banks are saying:
Bank of America
The Fed “will get pushed into deeper cuts” with another 75 basis points coming in the fourth quarter and 125 basis points next year, economists and strategists including Aditya Bhave, Mark Cabana and Alex Cohen wrote.
Barclays
The bank continues to see the Fed cutting by 25 basis points in November and December, followed by three more quarter-point reductions in 2025, US economists led by Marc Giannoni wrote in a note. But given the Fed’s 50 basis point move Wednesday, which Barclays did not expect, they now see the target range at the end of next year falling to 3.50% to 3.75%.
Citigroup
Citi economists Veronica Clark and Andrew Hollenhorst kept their forecast for another 75 basis points of reductions this year, with 50 basis points coming November and 25 basis points in December. “Risks remain balanced to an even faster pace of cuts,” they wrote in a note. The bank expects more 25 basis point shifts in 2025, taking the terminal rate to a range of 3% to 3.25%.
Deutsche Bank
Economists led by Matthew Luzzetti maintained their view the Fed will cut in quarter-point increments through the March 2025 meeting before shifting to a quarterly pace — ultimately leaving fed funds between 3.25% and 3.5% by the end of next year. The Fed’s signals Wednesday, they wrote, “were that this action was a ‘recalibration’ of policy and not the start of a sequence of larger reductions.”