The Federal Reserve kept benchmark interest rates on hold after a two-day scheduled policy meeting that ended on Wednesday. The Fed, however, maintained that the US economy is on track despite a spike in COVID-19 cases.

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The US job market still had "some ground to cover" before it would be time to pull back from economic support, chairman Jerome Powell said. "Right now, it is not the ideal time to think about raising interest rates. Instead, the Fed is focusing on asset purchases," he said.

Though the US central bank hinted at progress on talks on tapering of bond purchases, it did not offer any clarity on the timing of tightening of stimulus that it introduced in 2020 to help the world's largest economy tackle the fallout from the pandemic.

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Not time to start talking about tapering asset purchases: Powell

For now, the central bank is purchasing $120 billion in Treasury and mortgage bonds each month to support the US economy.

Here's how analysts and economists are reading the latest policy statement from the Fed and chairman Powell's remarks:

Madhavi Arora, lead economist, Emkay Global Financial Services:

Changes to the statement language skewed mildly hawkish as the Federal Open Market Committee indicated that the US economy "has made progress” towards its goals to begin reducing asset purchases. But overall tone on the path of rates remains pretty dovish.

On the composition of tapering, Powell threw cold water on the idea of an early start to tapering mortgage-backed securities vs Treasuries but indicated some support for tapering the purchase of the former more rapidly than the latter.

We see this meeting opening the door to a possible taper announcement in December that begins reducing the purchase pace in January-March.

Madan Sabnavis, chief economist, CARE Ratings:

The Fed policy talks of continuity in its approach to quantitative easing of $120 billion a month which has assuaged markets. Interestingly, it has mentioned that it is not too confident on employment generation in the country and while there is an improvement, there is no full-scale recovery as yet. This gives a signal that rates will remain untouched for some more time even though inflation is high. Inflation is considered to be transient as of now.

Also read: Is India headed for stagflation? Here's how COVID-19 vaccination coverage is linked

A sharp recovery in the US accompanied by interest rates going up can retard FPI flows. The signal now of the status quo is useful to that extent as it indicates that funds can continue to flow to emerging market economies.

VK Vijayakumar, chief investment strategist, Geojit Financial Services:

The Fed's announcement sends out the clear message that a rate hike is far away. The Fed chief's statement that 'substantial progress on inflation and unemployment is needed" is indicative of the central bank's priority now. If things go according to its plans, a rate hike is possible only by the end of 2022 or early 2023. Tapering may happen by April 2022 and the Fed is likely to communicate this appropriately and condition the market for the event.

An important takeaway from the Fed's announcement is that it is not unduly concerned about the asset price inflation caused by the humongous liquidity it has unleashed. It can be presumed that the Fed sees no threats to financial stability.

Sandip Sabharwal of Asksandipsabharwal.com:

The Fed policy was on expected lines. They have slowly started recognising the pickup in the economy and inflationary build-up. The key is to see how long they can hold up the start of the bond-buying tapering. They are likely watching the current Covid wave and will give a more clear outlook in September.

Also read: Indianomics: Morgan Stanley maintains 6.5% global growth forecast; says RBI can look through inflation for now

As such it's status quo right now and markets will react to results and overall global market movements where valuations are extremely stretched. The possibility of sudden knee-jerk selloffs is increasing.

AK Prabhakar, head of research, IDBI Capital:

The latest Fed policy was on expected lines and good for markets. There was no negative surprise.

Arnab Das, global market strategist, Invesco:

What has happened over the last few months is that the Fed has to a significant extent reduced the concern that it would let inflation run too hard. It has begun talking about tapering, talking about it a bit more deeply but not going so far as to preempt the labour market and to preempt recovery, which does shift the tone from having been too dovish before they started talking about tapering to being too hawkish and now being just about right in the kind of Goldilocks way.

Also read: Inflation will moderate, expect it to be below 6% in July, says CEA

I agree with the consensus that this was a bit of a dovish take on the growth recovery and the process. I think it is appropriate because the delta variant – although the Fed downplayed the risks of delta variant to the US economy itself, it is clear that the delta variant is constraining recovery in parts of the world.