Federal Reserve policymakers will need to raise interest rates higher and keep them there longer to tackle the higher prices caused by sticky inflation, San Francisco Fed President Mary Daly said Saturday.
“It’s clear there is more work to do,” Daly said in a speech at Princeton University. “In order to put this episode of high inflation behind us, further policy tightening, maintained for a longer time, will likely be necessary.”
Daly acknowledged that high inflation and the aggressive policy action taken by the Fed to bring it down have caused panic on Main Street and Wall Street. “The responses range from fearing these actions will tip the economy into a recession to fearing they won’t be enough to get the job done,” she said.
That fear has led volatile market swings upon each release of new economic data as uncertainty leads investors to “look for answers in the immediate,” said Daly, “but achieving our mandated goals takes time and a broader view.” The Fed’s current tightening regimen, she said, “was and remains appropriate given the magnitude and persistence of elevated inflation readings.”
High inflation levels in goods, housing and other sectors along and strong economic data, she said, has led her to question the momentum of disinflation.
Daly does not currently vote on Fed policy decisions but is a member of the Federal Open Market Committee and participates in policy meetings.
Her speech followed a week of similar warnings from the Federal Reserve.
Minneapolis Federal Reserve President Neel Kashkari said last Wednesday that he’s “open to the possibility” of a larger interest rate increase in the Fed’s March policy meeting, “whether it’s 25 or 50 basis points.” (That’s a quarter or half of a percent. A basis point is one hundredth of one percent).
Atlanta Fed President Raphael Bostic also said Wednesday that he believes the Fed needs to raise its policy rate by half a percentage point at the next meeting.
On Thursday, Fed Governor Christopher Waller warned that painful interest rates could go higher than expected, citing a slew of recent stronger-than-expected economic data.
The Federal Reserve has lifted its target range for interest rates from near zero to between 4.5% to 4.75% over the past year in their fight against inflation. In February, they slowed the pace of their hikes to a quarter of a percentage point, down from half a percent in December. Inflation reached a 40-year high in 2022 but began to fall in the final quarter of the year. January’s inflation data showed that the rate of prices increases had inched up once again.
