Odaily reports that Federal Reserve Governor Bowman said that a decline in investment demand and savings could raise the neutral interest rate, and the neutral level of the central bank's policy rate may have risen since the COVID-19 pandemic. Bowman said that after the outbreak, factors such as low borrowing costs and supportive fiscal policies immediately gained the upper hand, and these factors kept the US economy essentially stable in 2021 and 2022 even after the Fed raised interest rates significantly. The same factors may have led to the so-called rise in the neutral interest rate. Economists also refer to this level as R* (R-star), which is the policy level at which the Federal Reserve neither promotes nor restricts economic activity. Bowman said, "In the recent tightening cycle, one way to describe the elasticity of actual economic activity to the rise in interest rates is to say that some of the factors mentioned earlier have led to a rise in R*."