Loretta Mester, Interview: Face the Nation

“So I’m not predicting a recession. If you look at the forecast that where submitted and released earlier this week of all the participants in the FOMC meeting. You’ll see that we do have growth slowing to a little bit below trend growth. And we do have the unemployment rate moving up a little bit and that’s okay. We want to see some slowing in demand to get it in better line with supply, but there’s other things that are going to be happening later in the year, too. For example, we’ve already seen households really shifting some of their spending rather than spending on goods, which really was the bulk of spending coming out of the pandemic, height of the pandemic. When the economy reopened into more services, that’s going to help alleviate some of the upward pressure on goods prices. So other parts of the economy will be moving as well as what we’re doing on interest rates.”