Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis President Neel Kashkari said policymakers have yet to win the fight against inflation and that they will consider more tightening if needed.
“We have to get inflation back down to 2% over a reasonable period of time,” Kashkari said Tuesday in an interview on Bloomberg Television. “Ultimately, the economy will tell us how much is needed to get there. And I just don’t know.”
Kashkari repeated comments made recently that it’s too soon to definitively make a call on whether or not more interest-rate increases are required, and that officials need to keep watching how data, especially on inflation, come in.
Read more: Fed’s Kashkari Says Too Soon to Declare Victory on Inflation
Policymakers left interest rates unchanged in a range of 5.25% to 5.5% — a 22-year high — at their meeting last week and Chair Jerome Powell hinted that the central bank may be done raising interest rates. An increase in Treasury yields over the past few months was seen by some Fed officials as helping further restrain the economy.
Kashkari said that he and his colleagues on the policy-setting Federal Open Market Committee have not yet discussed when they’ll start cutting rates, but have talked about potentially needing to do so if inflation is slowing meaningfully to ensure that real rates don’t become more restrictive.
“If we didn’t back off a little bit, then real rates would be getting tighter and tighter and tighter and that’s real, that’s math,” Kashkari said.
While he’s encouraged by the disinflation that’s under way, Kashkari noted that economic activity and the labor market remain robust.
“I’m not seeing a lot of evidence that the economy is weakening.”
A run-up in 10-year Treasury yields could be due to any number of reasons, Kashkari said, adding that he’s not comfortable definitively saying which reason is driving the move.
--With assistance from Michael McKee, Lisa Abramowicz and Jonathan Ferro.
(Updates with more comment from Kashkari in fifth paragraph.)
