Two voting members of the Federal Reserve’s policy committee signaled Tuesday that they were nearing the point where they would pull the trigger and lift interest rates.
Jeffrey Lacker, the president of the Richmond Fed, told reporters that a June rate hike was an “attractive option” for him, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Lacker is one of the more hawkish Fed presidents, so pressing for a rate hike in June is perhaps not so surprising, said Michael Hanson, senior economist at Bank of America Merrill Lynch.
More telling may be the views of John Williams, the president of the San Francisco Fed, who was a top lieutenant of his predecessor, Fed Chairwoman Janet Yellen. Williams is viewed as a close ally of Yellen.
In an interview with the Financial Times on Tuesday, Williams sounded a bit more hawkish, saying conditions are “getting closer and closer to those where it makes sense to really start thinking seriously about starting this process of normalization.”
The San Francisco Fed president has not committed to a move in June but said it would be the first meeting where a hike should be on the table.
“I do think June is very much live for the Fed,” Hanson said.
“It comes down to the fact that labor markets are doing better, and rightly or wrongly, they are looking through low inflation as transitory.”
In the interview, Williams repeated this assessment, saying the plunge in oil prices and the strong dollar had pulled down inflation but that these factors would be temporary.
“Those influences will wane and the basic forces of a strong labor market, strong economy, will...become the dominant theme, and to my mind push wages up to 3-3.5% and push inflation back to 2%,” he said.
Williams argued against the notion, espoused recently by Larry Summers, that the central bank should wait until inflation is closer to its 2% annual inflation target before hiking rates.
It is better for the Fed to start raising rates “gradually, thoughtfully,” he said, then risk getting behind the curve on inflation. This would force the Fed to hike rates much more dramatically, he said.作者: aimei 时间: 2015-2-10 15:04
