All eyes will be on Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell today. Powell is speaking at the European Central Bank Forum on Central Banking 2025, Sintra, Portugal, on July 1 at 9:30 a.m ET.

Powell says he cannot commit to July. “It’s going to depend on how the data evolve,” he says at an ECB conference in Portugal. I can’t say; we’ll go meeting after meeting and see how the data evolves. We got on hold when we saw the amount of the tariffs.”

At the ECB Forum on Central Banking 2025, leading voices in central banking will discuss how to navigate macroeconomic shifts and develop appropriate policy responses during these unpredictable times.

Live webstream of the ECB Forum on Central Banking 2025, where Powell will be one of the panelists, can be watched at the website of ECB – ecb.europa.eu

Andrew Bailey, Governor, Bank of England, Christine Lagarde, President, European Central Bank, Chang Yong Rhee, Governor, Bank of Korea, Kazuo Ueda, Governor, Bank of Japan, are the other panelists, and the moderator is Francine Lacqua, Anchor and Editor-at-large, Bloomberg Television.

During his remarks, Powell is expected to potentially offer insights into future monetary policy.

With the unemployment rate low and inflation above their 2% objective, Fed members, including Chairman Powell, have been hesitant to lower interest rates from the current 4.25% to 4.5% level until it is evident that the Trump administration’s tariff plans would not cause a new increase in prices.

By sending Fed Chair Jerome Powell a list of central bank interest rates from around the world with handwritten commentary stating that the U.S. rate should be between Denmark’s 1.75% and Japan’s 0.5%, President Donald Trump continued to pressure the U.S. Federal Reserve to loosen monetary policy on Monday. He also told Powell that he was “as usual, ‘too late.'”

“You should lower the rate by a lot. Hundreds of billions being lost,” Trump said in the note, which was also posted to social media with further commentary from the president saying that being a central banker in the U.S. was “one of the easiest, yet most prestigious jobs in America, and they have FAILED…We should be paying 1% interest, or better!”

Investors anticipate that the Fed will resume decreasing the benchmark policy rate at its September meeting and continue to lower it thereafter. Goldman Sachs economists, who have been negative about the U.S. GDP and inflation outlook and had expected the Fed to wait until the end of the year to lower rates, pushed their estimated first cut into September on Monday.

Powell, till now, has withstood the pressure from the White House to cut rates in a hurry, despite inflation trending lower. Markets will look forward to cues from Powell when he speaks at the European Central Bank Forum on Central Banking 2025 today.