After 17 consecutive increases at each meeting since June 2004, the central bank [Federal Reserve] voted to hold its benchmark interest rate steady at 5.25 percent. Policy makers suggested that they wanted more time to see where the economy was headed before deciding whether further increases might be necessary.

In a statement accompanying its decision, the Fed acknowledged that inflation had accelerated. But it predicted that slowing economic growth — led by the retreat of the housing market — would lead to smaller consumer price increases before long.

“Readings on core inflation have been elevated in recent months,” the Fed’s policy-making committee said. “However, inflation pressures seem likely to moderate over time, reflecting contained inflation expectations and the cumulative effects of monetary policy actions and other factors restraining aggregate demand.”

The central bank left itself ample room to resume its rate increases if inflation proves more stubborn than expected. But it implied that its hope was to avoid any more increases for the foreseeable future.

The shift amounts to a bet by the Federal Reserve’s chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, on an elusive goal in monetary policy: a “soft landing” in which the economy slows enough to cool spending and ease inflationary pressures but not enough to cause a big jump in unemployment.

The move comes at a risky moment. Inflation, while still modest, has been stoked by surging oil prices that are now being accompanied by rising costs for materials and labor.

At the same time, economic growth has slowed sharply, unemployment is creeping up and productivity growth — the primary determinant of overall prosperity and the crucial ingredient in having healthy growth without rising prices — has stalled.

In a sign of uncertainty among policy makers, the Fed committee was not unanimous in its decision on interest rates, a relatively rare occurrence in a body that strives for consensus. Jeffrey M. Lacker, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, who has often sounded alarms about inflation, argued for raising rates an additional one-quarter percentage point. It was the first such dissent since Mr. Bernanke took over the Fed chairmanship from Alan Greenspan in February.

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.

“It’s the end of the game,” wrote Bernard Baumohl, executive director of the Economic Outlook Group in Princeton Junction, N.J., in a research note to clients.

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He argued that the Fed’s previous 17 rate increases had already set the stage for lower inflation and that further rate increases risked tilting an economy that was already hitting the brakes into a full-blown recession.

“By keeping their hands off the monetary throttle at this time,” Mr. Baumohl wrote, “the Federal Reserve has increased the probability the economy is on approach toward a soft landing.”

The nation’s overall economic growth slowed to an annual pace of just 2.5 percent in the second quarter of this year, less than half the torrid pace of the first quarter. Job creation has been low for the last four months, and the unemployment rate edged up to 4.8 percent in July from 4.6 percent in June.

But other experts are skeptical, saying the Fed may be forced by inflation data to begin raising rates again soon. In practice, the Fed has effectively engineered only one other “soft landing” in history — in 1994 and 1995, under Mr. Greenspan.

Conditions then were in many ways more benign than they are today, however. Inflation was heading down, not up; the federal budget was moving toward lower rather than higher deficits; energy prices were erratic, but far lower than they are today.

“The current situation looks a lot more like the 1970’s than the 1990’s,” said Allen Sinai, chief economist at Decision Economics. “We are seeing the leading edge, though not necessarily the ultimate outcome, of what in the old days used to be called the wage-price inflation spiral.”

Mr. Bernanke, both before and after he became Fed chairman, has said that his definition of price stability is a “core” inflation rate — excluding prices for energy and food — of 1 to 2 percent. But by the Fed’s preferred measure of core inflation prices are about 2.9 percent higher than one year ago. That is the biggest year-over-year jump in 11 years.

“Rather than taking pre-emptive measures against a very serious inflation threat, Bernanke and company have adopted a very dangerous reactionary approach,” said Richard Yamarone, chief economist at Argus Research. “They’re in a wait-and-see mode.”

Laurence H. Meyer, a former Fed governor and now an economic forecaster at Macroeconomic Advisers, predicted that it would take more than a soft landing to reduce inflation significantly. For that to happen, he said, unemployment would have to rise for a sustained period.

But Mr. Meyer speculated that Fed officials might not want to reduce inflation to Mr. Bernanke’s unofficial targets. He noted that the Fed’s latest economic outlook, based on forecasts from Fed district banks, called for core inflation to remain about 2 or 2.25 percent through 2007.

Even that goal could require a painful economic adjustment. “There’s too much inflation in the system,” said Mr. Harris of Lehman Brothers, who predicted that the Fed would be forced to raise rates again before the year is over. “At this stage, there has to be a bumpy landing.”