Wall St eyes Fed minutes for light on rate outlook, fiscal policy risks

Washington

DETAILS about the closed-door policy discussion Federal Reserve officials held last month could help explain why several of them increased the number of interest-rate hikes they expect in 2017 without significantly upgrading their economic forecasts. Officials will likely be less revealing about the timing of the next policy move.

Minutes of the Dec 13-14 meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee, during which officials decided to raise their benchmark lending rate by a quarter percentage point, are scheduled to be released at 2 pm on Wednesday in Washington.

In quarterly projections released following the meeting, enough policymakers raised the number of hikes they foresee in 2017 to lift the median estimate to three from…