Many economists said they disagreed with the Fed’s sanguine outlook, saying that prices and wages were both climbing significantly faster than just a year ago and showed no signs of slowing yet.

“There hasn’t been even a whisper of inflation pressures easing,” Ethan Harris, chief economist at Lehman Brothers, said. “It’s amazing that the Fed can sound that comfortable on a day that you’ve had another piece of bad news on the inflation front. If I were on the Fed, I would have voted for another rate increase.”

A few hours before the Fed announced its decision, the Commerce Department reported that workers’ compensation — the biggest component in production costs — climbed at an annual rate of 5.4 percent in the second quarter of 2006. Unit labor costs, which are the cost of labor necessary to produce a given amount of output, were 3.2 percent higher in the second quarter than during the period 12 months earlier. That was the biggest jump in almost five years.

The dilemma for policy makers is that if the Fed is forced into a serious crackdown on inflation, it risks throwing the economy into a recession. That would leave workers whose wages have barely kept up with price increases in worse shape, just as many are beginning to reap some modest gains from economic growth. And with energy prices up sharply, many workers, whose pay increases have lagged far behind productivity gains, have less disposable income for other purposes.

The central bank stopped short of saying that additional “firming” — Fed jargon for higher interest rates — would be necessary. Instead, it repeated previous statements that “the extent and timing of any additional firming that may be needed to address these risks will depend on the evolution of the outlook for both inflation and economic growth.”

Among economists, one camp interpreted the statement to mean the Fed was essentially finished with this round of interest rate increases. And in contrast to those more worried about inflation, they argued that the Fed was right to leave interest rates alone.