FOMC to meet in March, expected to stay the course

On March 18 and 19, the Federal Open Market Committee will have the second of its eight scheduled meetings for 2014, during which it sets monetary policy for the Federal Reserve System. Many in the investment world will be keeping tabs on the meeting to find out, most notably, how the FOMC will treat the continued tapering of its quantitative easing policy and if there will be any changes in interest rates.

“Everybody in the commercial real estate world is watching these meetings very closely, thinking about what it means for the next four or five years,” says Raymond Torto, global chairman of CBRE research.

In December 2012, the Federal Reserve announced that it would continue to suppress interest rates as long as the nation’s U3 unemployment rate remained above a lower threshold of 6.5 percent. With U3 unemployment rates in 2014 of 6.6 percent and 6.7 percent for January and February, respectively, there were concerns among some in the mark