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It was another quiet week for the Fed. In case you missed it, its Main Street Lending Program, targeting U.S. small and midsize businesses, gained some traction this week with loans held by the Fed increasing to about $230M.

Didn’t we stop caring about numbers this small ages ago? Well, yes and no.

In the grand scheme of things, $230M is a speck on the Fed’s $7TN balance sheet. Nevertheless, the Main Street Program could provide some insight into the health of the economy into the Fall. Fed officials have been diligent in noting that a slow uptake is not a failure. And depending on how the economy recovers in the fall, this program could become a more central policy tool and merits watching.

And oh yeah, remember how Fed was doing a year-long policy framework review? That is about to wrap up sometime over the next few weeks. For those who couldn’t wait to hear the results, Fed Chair Jerome Powell, as he does so well, provided some guidance: “To a large extent, we’re already doing the things that are in there.”

Of all the “things that are in there”, I’d expect the policy framework around inflation to be one of the most important. The Fed has consistently undershot its 2% inflation target for a long time and this review could formalize an average infl...

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