Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta President Raphael Bostic said he’s hopeful that the “explosive” price pressures seen during the Covid-19 pandemic will normalize over the next year.
Speaking at a conference in Atlanta on Wednesday, Bostic said “we still have a ways to go” to curb the significant price growth seen over the last few years.
While the breadth of inflation is still quite high, he said a reduction in that breadth would help him gain the confidence needed to cut interest rates.
“My outlook is that if things go according to what I expect — inflation goes slowly, the labor market slowly and orderly moves back into a sort of a weaker stance, but a stable-growth stance — I’m looking at the end of the year, the fourth quarter, as the time where we might actually think about and be prepared to reduce rates,” Bostic said.
The Atlanta Fed chief said many of the different measures of inflation he looks at on his dashboard “are moving back into the target range.”
The US economy expanded at a “slight or modest” pace across most regions and consumers pushed back against higher prices since early April, the Fed said in its Beige Book survey of regional business contacts, published Wednesday.
Fed officials have held rates in a range of 5.25% to 5.5%, a two-decade high, since last July. A series of policymakers have indicated they need to see more data to become confident that inflation is set to return to the central bank’s 2% target.
Bostic votes on the policy-setting Federal Open Market Committee this year, which meets next on June 11-12.
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.