(Bloomberg) -- Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco President Mary Daly said market anticipation of interest-rate cuts next year is misplaced, as the central bank aims to keep policy tight to secure 2% inflation.
“I don’t see that happening at all,” Daly said Wednesday in an interview with Michael McKee on Bloomberg Television when asked about the trajectory in futures pricing that suggests rate hikes followed by reductions.
Policymakers aim to boost the benchmark rate into “restrictive territory” and then “holding it there until we see inflation” truly get to 2%, she said. The Fed will be “staying the course” until the job is done, Daly said.
The San Francisco Fed chief has voiced concern about tipping the economy into a recession, saying last week that the Fed needs to use “extreme data dependence” in order to navigate the narrow path it has to bring inflation down while avoiding causing undue pain in the economy.
She said Wednesday that it’s important to keep an eye out for financial dislocations. But “that’s not what I am seeing right now,” she said.
Fed’s Forecasts
Policymakers raised rates by three quarters of a percentage point at their meeting last month, the third such increase in a row. That brought the Fed’s benchmark rate to a range of 3% to 3.25%, the highest level since 2008.
Fresh projections released after the Fed’s September meeting showed that officials see another 125 basis points of increases this year. The tighter policy path will push the unemployment rate, currently at 3.7%, to 4.4% by the end of next year, according to their median forecast.
Chair Jerome Powell and his colleagues have been front-loading rate increases in an effort to bring inflation, which peaked at a 40-year high of 9.1% in June, down toward the Fed’s 2% target.
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