Federal Reserve leaves interest rates unchanged

May 1 (UPI) -- The Federal Reserve unanimously voted Wednesday to keep its benchmark interest rates unchanged.

Fed Chairman Jerome Powell and other policy makers chose to keep the federal funds rate between 2.24 percent and 2.5 percent after their two-day policy meeting in Washington, D.C., adding it would take a measured approach in deciding when to next adjust it.

"In light of global economic and financial developments and muted inflation pressures, the committee will be patient as it determines what future adjustments to the target range for the federal funds rate may be appropriate to support these outcomes," the Federal Open Market Committee said.

The Fed noted that it received information indicating that the labor market had remained "strong" and economic activity was rising at a "solid" rate.

"On balance, market-based measures of inflation compensation have remained low in recent months and survey based measures of long term inflation expectations are little changed," the committee said.

Wednesday's decision came a day after President Donald Trump called for the Fed to lower rates.

"Our Federal Reserve has incessantly lifted interest rates, even though inflation is very low and instituted a very big dose of quantitative tightening," Trump wrote on Twitter. "We have the potential to go up like a rocket if we did some lowering of rates, like one point and some quantitative easing."

In December, the FOMC indicated it would raise rates twice in 2019, but has yet to announce any hikes so far.

At its last policy meeting in March, the Fed also elected to keep interest rates unchanged after hiking rates every other meeting since December 2017.