Fed Improves Growth Projection

The country’s economic recovery might get a little bit faster. According to minutes from the Federal Reserve’s January 25 policy meeting, the bank’s governors now say they believe the economy could grow as much as 3.9 percent this year, better than the 3 to 3.6 percent they’d earlier predicted. Despite the improvement, economists say that’s not nearly fast enough to chip away at the country’s high unemployment rate; they say the jobless rate will probably remain around 9 percent until 2013. The bank's governors also voiced support for a program, criticized by inflation hawks, to buy hundreds of billions in Treasury bonds.