The regional bank crisis has been partly blamed by some on aggressive interest rates by the U.S. Federal Reserve, which forced some lenders to seek new capital to make up for a fall in the value of assets linked to interest rates.
Tighter credit conditions meant that "our policy rate may not need to rise as much as it would have otherwise to achieve our goals," Powell told a central bank conference in Washington. "People thought that inflation was going to come down faster and that the pressure on these regional banks and those failures were leading to this narrative that the Fed was going to lower interest rates by the end of this year. I don't think that's the case," Plumb said.