Speeches, Interviews, Essays

Article excerpt available.  Text and video have not yet been made available. “I believe you need to bring inflation down by bringing demand down … I’m looking to be convinced that demand is in fact coming down, and that that will then start to bring inflation down.”

“Well, you know, as a voting member of the FOMC, I tried not to make it a point not to prejudge and make decisions when you’re still weeks out from the meeting. And we are going to get a lot of important data between now. I think the part that makes this job difficult is…

Article excerpts below. A partial video of the interview is also available. — “I’m hopeful that we can keep it as just a credit tightening, not a true financial crisis.” “If there is a regional and commercial banking, if the credit crunch turns into something worse that will be a threat to Iowa, to Illinois,…

“Well, I try to tell everyone, we go meeting to meeting, and we let the data guide us. My outlook right now is that, if the economy proceeds as I expect, we’re in a good place in terms of policy.” “But there’s a lot of data that’s going to come out between now and that…

On 5/26/23, Loretta Mester spoke to Steve Liesman of CNBC about today’s PCE report, the upcoming jobs report (June 2nd) and the upcoming CPI report (June 13th) and how the data informs the Fed’s June 14th decision.

“I think we need to bring the interest—and of course I haven’t decided anything about the June meeting, but if you think about what the path of rates are going to be. What I’d like to do is get…to a level of the funds rate where I could say, OK, in my mind, there’s a…

Article excerpts available.  Text and video have not yet been made available. — “We are in the middle of a demand slowdown.” “We may be moving from a world where labor is plentiful available and labor is short.”

“While inflation is still too high, there are some promising signs of moderation. I believe we may be at, or near, the point where monetary policy can pause raising interest rates. This will provide an opportunity to more fully assess the impact of the actions taken to date and the general tightening of credit conditions…

“Well, it basically means that we’re going to let the data guide us, and we don’t want to be locked into any particular movement. Look,  we know that right now, the policies that we’ve done, the tightening that we’ve done, is just starting to show up into the economy. And the real question is, how…

“I do not expect the data coming in over the next couple of months will make it clear that we have reached the terminal rate. And I do not support stopping rate hikes unless we get clear evidence that inflation is moving down towards our 2 percent objective. But whether we should hike or skip…