Good morning from the Financial Times. Today is Thursday, March 18th, and this is your FT News Briefing.

The Federal Reserve indicated it won't raise US interest rates until at least 2024,

and Microsoft is launching an investigation into security groups over last month's cyber attack.

Plus, Stripes' $95 billion valuation has turned a lot of heads in Silicon Valley.

The FT's Tim Veraccio will impact all the investor excitement over the digital payments group.

They've succeeded by being a very Silicon Valley company and very innovative and very hardcore

engineering, but also by being unlike a lot of their neighbors.

A Mark Filipino, and here's the news you need to start your day.

The Fed is sounding pretty optimistic these days. After yesterday's meeting of the US

Federal Open Market Committee, Fed sharply upgraded its 2021 US growth forecast to

6.5%. Fed also said it expected unemployment to drop, and the US Central Bank indicated it will

not raise interest rates until at least 2024. To help tie this all together, I have the FT's

US Capital Markets Correspondent, Colby Smith on the line. Colby, if the Fed is so confident in this

year's economic outlook, why not bump up interest rates sooner? Well, it's really a reflection of

its new framework that it recently rolled out. Since August, it's been approaching interest rates

and inflation and economic growth in a slightly different way than it has in the past.

So now it's in a position where it wants to let inflation run above its 2% target.

And that's different than its past approach to inflation here. And in order to do so, it's proven

that it has this willingness to keep interest rates incredibly low in order to support the economy

and drive inflation above this 2% level. And at the same time, it said it's going to keep policy

rates steady until it sees maximum employment. And so I think what this really reflects is that

no matter kind of how strong the economic recovery is going to be, the Fed has certain goals in mind

...