Chicago Federal Reserve President Charles Evans, speaking in Tokyo

  • Below-target U.S. inflation is "a serious policy outcome miss."
  • U.S. economy, now at 4.4 percent unemployment, has returned to "essentially" full employment, inflation has run below the Fed's 2-percent target for a full eight years
  • "I believe demonstrating a strong commitment to our objectives by trying harder to hit our symmetric inflation objective sooner rather than later is key to actually achieving this goal"
  • Evans did not lay out exactly how that effort should translate into interest-rate policy, and he did not give any new forecasts for the U.S. economic outlook
  • hinted his preference is for a slow path of rate hikes

via Reuters

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Evans at a conference sponsored by the Bank of Japan and the Institute for Monetary and Economic Studies