U.S. central bank surprised by downturn
The falling U.S. economy slumped faster than anticipated in March, forcing the American central bank to launch its trillion dollar financial rescue package, said the latest minutes of meetings of the U.S. Federal Reserve released Wednesday. The central bank governors, who constituted the open market committee of the Federal Reserve, had not expected the U.S. economy to slide as badly between January and March as it did, according to an official paraphrase of the March 17 to 19 discussions. "Nearly all meeting participants said that conditions had deteriorated relative to their expectations at the time of the January meeting," said the meeting's minutes.
Regardless of the amount of stimulus that the central bank and Washington have injected into the domestic economy, the committee and its staff apparently rejected any sort of turnaround in the current year. "The staff's projections for real GDP in the second half of 2009 and in 2010 were revised down, with real GDP expected to flatten out gradually over the second half of this year," said the minutes of the meeting.
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