Chair Jerome Powell says the Federal Reserve will likely cut its key interest rate slowly and deliberately in the coming months, in part because inflation has shown signs of persistence and the Fed’s officials want to see where it heads next.

October inflation readings out this week have shown little progress toward the Fed's two percent inflation target, putting into question how deeply the Federal Reserve will cut interest rates in 2025.

October's Consumer Price Index (CPI), which measures changes in the cost of consumer goods and services, showed that annual inflation rose by 2.6%. That's not an alarmingly high rate of inflation. It's also only a modest uptick from September's CPI reading, which measured annual inflation at 2.4%.