In one sense, you could say that Wednesday’s decision by the Federal Reserve to cut rates was of minimal importance. The interest rate the Fed more or less directly controls — the federal funds rate — is the rate at which banks lend one another money overnight. And it’s hard to think of any businesses or consumers who will change their plans because the annualized interest rate on one-day borrowing has fallen a half a percentage point, from around 5.5 percent to around 5 percent — which means that if you borrow $1,000, your repayment the next day falls by 1.4 cents.

Yet it was a momentous move all the same. For one thing, Fed rate changes tend to percolate into longer-term interest rates that really do matter for the economy. For example, the series of rate hikes the Fed undertook in 2022 and 2023 drove 30-year fixed mortgage interest rates

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