Fed Official Sees Higher Rates by Year End

[WestVirginiaRebel]

Wall Street Journal:

WASHINGTON—The president of the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank said Thursday the Fed may need to increase short-term interest rates by year end if underlying inflation rises as he anticipates.

Narayana Kocherlakota, in an interview with Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal, said that if the U.S. economy grows at about 3% this year, as he expects, and underlying inflation ticks higher, as he expects, then the Fed will end its $600 billion bond-buying program as planned in June.

He expects core inflation (inflation excluding volatile food and energy prices) will rise from about 0.8% late last year, when the Fed launched its bond-buying to about 1.3% by year end, he said. As a result, lifting the Fed's target for short-term interest rates by more than half a percentage point late this year is "certainly possible." He noted that the often-cited Taylor Rule, named for the Stanford University professor who devised it, would in that circumstance call for a ¾-percentage-point increase in rates.

"If you consider monetary policy was appropriate at the end of 2010...and then you see core inflation go up by 50 basis points over the course of 2011..the usual response that we know from 20 years of thinking about monetary policy (or even more) is to raise the target rate by even more than that increase in observed inflation," he said. "So that means you should be raising the target rate by more than 50 basis points."

The Fed dropped its short-term interest-rate target nearly to zero in December 2008 during the financial crisis, and promised to keep it there for "an extended period." Trading in futures suggests markets anticipate a Fed increase to 0.5% early in 2012.
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