Why the Fed isn’t hiking interest rates ... for now

The Federal Reserve skips interest rate hikes for the first time in 15 months; dozens are dead and hundreds are missing after a migrant boat sinks near Greece.

Tonight's Sentences was written by Jariel Arvin.

The Fed decides against hiking interest rates

Win McNamee/Getty Images

• The Federal Reserve on Wednesday left interest rates unchanged for the first time since March 2020, when it began hikes to tamp down rampant inflation. [Associated Press / Christopher Rugaber]
• However, officials warned two more small hikes could come this year, depending on how the economy and financial system respond to the pause. [Reuters / Howard Schneider and Michael S. Derby]
• While the consumer price index rose just 4 percent in May compared to a year ago, unemployment remains much lower than the central bank’s target. [NBC / Rob Wile]
• But the US GDP is slowing and three major banks failed earlier this year amid higher interest rates, which suggests the hikes are impacting the economy. [ABC News / Max Zahn]
• The central bank forecasts inflation could fall to 3.9 percent by the end of 2023. [New York Times / Jeanna Smialek]

📍 If you read just one story

Vox's Sara Morrison explains how a dispute over changes to Reddit's policies resulted in thousands of the platform's pages going black. [Vox / Sara Morrison]

Dozens killed in migrant shipwreck off Greece

• Wednesday, at least 79 people died and hundreds more are missing after a fishing boat carrying migrants capsized and sank off the coast of southern Greece. [BBC / George Wright]
• Authorities rescued 104 people, mostly young men in their 20s reportedly from Egypt, Pakistan, and Syria. As many as 750 had been on board. [Reuters/ Karolina Tagaris and Stamos Prousalis]
• The boat sank on the trip to Italy from Libya, a major point for migration from North Africa to Europe; over 17,000 have died or gone missing in the Mediterranean since 2014. [AP / Derek Gatopoulos and Nicholas Paphitis]
• The Greek coast guard says it offered the men help when it spotted their boat on Tuesday, but they refused and accepted only food and supplies. [Al Jazeera]
• Greece’s hardline border policies have dramatically reduced migrant arrivals, but they’ve also brought heavy criticism from rights groups. [New York Times / Niki Kitsantonis and Cora Engelbrecht]

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Some US cities are restricting how landlords screen criminal history in rental applications to crack down on housing discrimination. [Vox / Rachel Cohen]

• The European Parliament on Wednesday approved its first set of comprehensive rules to regulate the artificial intelligence industry; those guidelines could become a model for Western countries. [CNBC / Ryan Browne]
• Bud Light is no longer the bestselling beer in the US after facing a boycott over its partnership with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney. [CNN / Jordan Valinsky]
• For the first time, scientists discovered phosphorous in an ocean on one of Saturn’s moons, suggesting it could support extraterrestrial life. [Atlantic / Marina Koren]

“They’ll probably pause, but I think they’ll very much want to avoid an outcome in markets where investors say, ‘Hurrah! The tightening cycle is over.’”

[Bill English, a former Fed official and now a finance professor at the Yale School of Management, on the central bank’s deliberations / CNBC]

We need to rethink discipline in schools

Education experts have looked to a number of factors as root causes of the Black-white achievement gap: family income, single parenthood, school resources. Another is the disparities in school discipline. In today’s episode of The Weeds, we dig into school discipline and the achievement gap with Francis Pearman of Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education.

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