Fed official cautions against declaring early triumph over inflation

Economy will still need to see several months of declines.

Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland President Loretta Mester repeated that she thinks the U.S. central bank needs to get rates above 4% by early 2023 and leave them there for some time to cool the hottest inflation in nearly 40 years.

Mester also reiterated that she does not expect the Fed to cut rates next year, noting that policy makers need to keep inflation expectations from becoming unanchored.

“In formulating my monetary policy views, I will be guarding against declaring victory over the inflation beast too soon,” Mester said last week during remarks prepared for an MNI webcast.

The Fed official, who votes in monetary policy this year, said she would like to see several months of declines in month-over-month inflation readings before concluding that inflation has peaked.

She also said she carefully will be watching medium and longer term inflation expectations for signs on whether high inflation is becoming embedded in the economy. “At that point, it would be considerably more difficult and more costly to bring inflation down,” she said.

Fed officials lifted rates by 75 basis points in July and June and could consider a similar move, or a 50 basis point increase, when they meet on Sept. 20-21.

Mester said the size of a rate increase at any particular Fed meeting, as well as where rates peak, will depend on the outlook for inflation. Answering questions after her speech, Mester declined to specify how big she favored the Fed going this month, saying those decisions will be made at the meeting.

“It’s better to focus on what is the path of interest rates,” she said. “We do have to raise rates from where they are now. I think we have to get into positive territory for the real rate, and that means we’re going to have to do more work than where we are now to get inflation on a downward path.”

An employment report for August showed that jobs growth moderated, and the unemployment rate rose to 3.7% as more workers entered the labor force.