Fed’s rate cut influenced lending in advance. But hiring may pick up down the road.
Fed’s rate cut influenced lending in advance. But hiring may pick up down the road.
Now that the Federal Reserve has cut interest rates by half a percentage point, lenders of all kinds will be cutting interest rates too, and borrowing will become less expensive for consumers and businesses. How much less will depend on what kind of business they’re running and what kind of borrowing they’re doing.
Most companies didn’t wake up to a brand-new world Thursday. They woke up to one that kinda felt like the day before. Or last week. Or last month. Karlyn Mitchell, a former economist at the Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank, said that’s because lenders had been expecting a cut.
“And so that was already priced into loans,” she said.
Bonds had adjusted. Banks had adjusted. And it’s not like companies that’ve already borrowed had been waiting in the same way homeowners might wait to refinance their mortgages. Mitchell said many businesses have floating loans that adjust on a regular basis — monthly, quarterly, yearly.
“Commercial banks, less and less, lend for, I mean, seven years would be an incredibly long loan. I don’t think those even happen anymore,” she said.
Smaller businesses aren’t getting immediate gratification either. They may rely on credit cards, and those rates take a while to change.
But the Fed’s cut did represent a pivot in business mentality.
“Investing doesn’t take overnight, right? There’s planning stages, there’s R&D, there’s all that stuff that takes time. I think the Fed is giving you the green light to get to work,” said Fred Hoffman, a finance professor at Rutgers University.
The companies best positioned to get to work are big corporations that can take on risk. Because bigger picture, borrowing money is not just about the cost of borrowing. It’s also about business conditions.
“We’ll have another president. We’ll have another Congress,” Hoffman said, which could come with changes to corporate taxes and tariffs.
It’s why Joe Brusuelas, chief economist at RSM, said businesses that are more risk-averse will act slowly. “Small firms will always lag by 12 to 24 months. Mid-market firms, usually about six to 12 months,” he said.
It could take some time before companies borrow, invest and hire.
“The hiring numbers we’re going to see for the remainder of the year will not be impacted by what the Fed did yesterday,” Brusuelas said.
He said we’ll have to wait until next year to see the Fed’s cuts play out in the job market.
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