Good evening. I'm Abden-Navaz. Jeff Bennett is away. On the news hour tonight, the Federal

Reserve cuts interest rates for the first time in four years. a major shift in its fight against inflation.

Lebanon is rocked by more exploding devices, this time involving walkie-talkies.

And we report on experimental deep sea mining for valuable metals

that's raising environmental concerns. Welcome to the News Hour. The Federal Reserve cut interest rates today for the first time in four years

with an aggressive move that lowers its benchmark rate by a half percentage point.

The Fed also said it intended to lower

interest rates by a full point before the year is out. Fed Chair Jerome Powell

said now is a good moment to make cuts and boost the jobs market. good the labor market is in a strong pace. We want to keep it there.

That's what we're doing.

For more on what's behind this decision

and what it could mean, I'm joined by David Wessel,

director of the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy at the Brookings Institution.

David, good to see you.

Good to see you.

So this decision to cut interest rates by a half percentage point, not a quarter point,

as some had speculated.

What's behind that why now think the

Federal Reserve realized that the labor market is softening or the metaphor that

J Powell used today is cooling and they're looking ahead and they don't want it to cool anymore. They expect

the unemployment rate to rise a little bit more, but they want to act preemptively to prevent

the labor market from going ahead and getting worse because they think they're

...