If any doubts remained about whether the Federal Reserve will be lowering its key interest rate later this month, the budget loggerheads a few blocks away in the nation’s capital may have cemented the move. Particularly if the impasse stretches out past a few days, Chair Jerome Powell and his fellow central bankers likely will err on the side of caution, which in this case would be a bias towards easing, Wall Street experts say. “The US government shutdown and associated data delays nudge what we judged was already a firmly odds-on Fed rate cut in October further odds-on,” Krishna Guha, head of global policy and ... (full story)