Fed may take ‘maybe two, maybe three’ rate hikes, says official

The Federal Reserve may hold 0.5 percentage point rate hikes for the next two or three meetings and then assess how the economy and inflation are responding before deciding whether further increases are needed, Atlanta Fed President Raphael Bostic said. .

The half-point increase adopted by the Fed last week “is already a pretty aggressive move. I don’t think we need to act even more aggressively,” Bostic said in comments to Bloomberg on Monday that appear to rule out a stronger 0.75 point rise.

“I think we can keep this pace and this cadence and really see how the markets evolve… We’re going to act a few times, maybe twice, maybe three times, see how the economy responds, see if inflation continues to approach our 2% target, and then we can take a break and see how things are going.”

Fed may have to carry greater burden of meeting inflation target

The Federal Reserve may not get as much help as it hopes from relief in supply chains as it struggles to bring inflation down to its 2% target, Minneapolis Fed President Neel Kashkari said Monday, highlighting a series of data that has yet to appear to show that consumers remain willing to spend despite higher prices.

“I’m confident that we’re going to bring inflation back to our 2% target, but I’m still not confident about how much of that burden we’ll have to carry versus getting help from the supply side,” Kashkari said in an interview with CNBC.

“Pretty much all of this news is in the wrong direction,” he said, citing the war in Ukraine and the Covid-19 lockdowns in China as upward pressure on prices.