Why the Fed almost certainly isn’t going to do an emergency rate cut | News World

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Stocks closed deep in the red for a second day in a row on Monday as questions swirl over whether the US economy is in a recession following Friday’s unexpectedly weak jobs report. Investors are increasingly hopeful that will push Federal Reserve officials to come to their rescue with an emergency rate cut.

That almost certainly won’t happen.

“There’s nothing in the Fed’s mandate that’s about making sure the stock market is comfortable,” Chicago Fed President Austan Goolsbee said in a New York Times interview on Monday.

In hindsight, there’s a strong case to be made for why the central bank should have cut its benchmark lending rate at its meeting last week, which concluded before the jobs report came out. Had…