Fed Williams in a Wall Street Journal interview
- There are crosscurrents in current economic data
- Labor market has remained very strong
- Overall picture is similar to where it was in July
- Some positive momentum into 2nd half of 2022
- Inflation still way too high
- Our focus is on getting inflation back down, far too high
- We will look across the data ahead of next meeting including inflation, employment data, job openings, and others
- Very focused on drivers of inflation, given that that's number 1 problem
- We clearly have an imbalance in the economy
- We need to slow demand enough to meet supply
- We will weigh all of this in the next meeting. Decision will be dependent on totality of the data
- Have to think about where we want to see interest rates both this and the next year
- We need to think about the path of the policy
- We need to get real interest rates above 0
- Demand is far exceeding supply
- We are not at restrictive policy yet
- We need to get interest rates higher than longer run neutral level
- Baseline case is that rates need to go somewhat above 3.5%
- Financial conditions have tightened quite a bit since beginning of the year
- That tightening is consistent with Fed's direction on policy
- We need to be very focused on getting inflation back down to 2%
- need to mitigate risk of high inflation becoming entrenched
- there will be a time when policy actions will change
- we will need restrictive policy for some time
- next year we are going to need to have restrictive policy for some time
- I see us needing to raise and hold interest rates through next year
- Will take some time before seen adjustment of rates downward
- inflation expectations are well anchored. Will take us a few years to get back to 2% inflation. We will get it done