Earlier headlines are here:Fed’s Williams: Makes sense to start raising rates in H2 of 2015
More details now from Reuters:
- The Federal Reserve should start raising U.S. interest rates in the second half of next year, and should do so only gradually, keeping borrowing costs well below normal levels even into 2017
- “Given the economic outlook, and given also my view that we need accommodative policy relative to historical norms, we need to have relatively low levels of interest rates for quite some time”
- “My own view is it makes sense to start raising rates in the second half of 2015″
- But the pace of rate increases, in Williams’ view, should be extremely slow, with rates ending 2016 well below the historical norm of 4 percent, “with the first digit being a ‘2’”
Adds Reuters:
Williams is not a voter on the Fed’s policy-setting panel this year, but his views bear watching because of his close ties to Fed Chair Janet Yellen, who was his boss until 2010, when she ran the San Francisco Fed and he was her research director.
