When you consider the politics of the doomers, its far worse than that. The economic-doomers want the Fed to lower rates to "save jobs". Because lower-rates tends to lower unemployment.

The Fed is ignoring them and keeping rates high, because the economic-doomers are wrong.

------------

So economic doomers complain about inflation (which the Fed is trying to fix with high rates), but also want to pretend that unemployment is secretly 10x worse than it really is for some reason.

The Fed is talking about lowering rates, because everybody is thirsty for the punch bowl. They want to be responsible, but it's sooo tempting.

Personally I believe they kept rates far too low for far too long last time, deceived by the way the free money inflated assets rather than consumer prices, and that's a big part of what caused the recent inflation spike.

Everyone I know that is an economic doomer is much more worried about inflation than they are about unemployment.

High rates favor labor money, low rates favor capital money. Low rates also improve job creation, so sometimes labor is divided.

Several rate cuts are expected this year. Based on Jerome Powell's speech yesterday, March cuts are unlikely, today's data would confirm that. Rate cuts likely beginning over summer depending on the data over the next few months.