As Federal Reserve officials near the midway point between their last policy meeting and the final one of the year, they appear to be converging on a message of patience, a signal they intend to leave interest rates unchanged as they wait for more evidence inflation is cooling.
“We can take our time to do it right,” San Francisco Fed President Mary Daly on Friday told a central banking conference in Frankfurt, Germany, referring to the US central bank’s battle to bring down high inflation.
The Fed is not certain it’s done enough to get inflation on track toward its 2 percent goal, she said, but the full effect of its rapid rate increases to date may be yet ahead. That uncertainty calls for “patience” and “measured” policy adjustments, she said.
At the same time, Daly said she wants to communicate “resolve,” a word that central bankers typically surface to show they are not ruling out a rate hike if needed, or mean to suggest rate cuts could come soon.
Speaking on CNBC, Boston Fed President Susan Collins also said the US central bank must be “patient and resolute, and I wouldn’t take additional firming off the table.”
The Fed raised short-term borrowing costs aggressively last year, and in July it delivered what many analysts now believe was the final rate hike in its current inflation battle.
Inflation by the Fed’s preferred measure was 3.4 percent in September, down from its 7.1 percent peak last summer, but above the central bank’s target.
With labor markets rebalancing but inflation still too high, Collins said, “the key point is we need to really stay the course.”
After the Fed’s decision in September to keep the policy rate in what is still the current 5.25 percent -5.50 percent range, a number of US central bankers cited the rise in longer-term bond yields as one reason it may not need to do any more policy tightening of its own.
Minutes of the Fed’s Oct. 31-Nov. 1 meeting are due to be released on Tuesday, and are expected to shed light on how much impact the higher bond yields had on the Fed’s decision to stand pat at that meeting.
Since then, the yield on the 10-year Treasury note has dropped by about half a percentage point from its mid-October near-5 percent peak, to the potential discomfort of Fed policymakers.
But, as analysts at Deutsche Bank wrote on Friday, “while the recent easing could produce a more hawkish Fed in theory, the Fed can afford to be less concerned with this easing given recent data showing progress on the labor market and inflation.” -Reuters
