(Reuters) – The U.S. central bank will likely need to raise borrowing costs further to bring inflation back to its 2% target within a reasonable time frame, Federal Reserve Governor Michelle Bowman said on Tuesday.
“My base case economic scenario continues to project that we will need to raise the federal funds rate further in order to maintain policy restrictive enough to return inflation to our 2% target within a reasonable time frame,” she said in a speech prepared for a presentation to a banking federation in Salt Lake City, Utah.
The Fed opted, at its last meeting, for an unchanged rate range, at 5.25%-5.50%, after a similar decision at its previous meeting, while analysts again anticipate a status quo on rates for the meeting on December 12 and 13.
Michelle Bowman, however, is part of a small minority of Fed officials who believe that the work of the American central bank is not finished.
She underlines in particular that inflation remains high and progress “uneven”, while the economic outlook is at an “unusually high level of uncertainty”, we can read in the document for her intervention.
“In my view, given potential structural changes in the economy, such as increased demand for investment relative to savings, it is entirely possible that the level of the federal funds rate consistent with low inflation and stable is higher than before the pandemic,” she writes.
(Reporting Lindsay Dunsmuir; French version Claude Chendjou, editing by Zhifan Liu)
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