Mester Joins Powell Seeing Case Building for December Fed Hike
- Growth on sustainable pace, labor market continuing to improve
- Says monetary policy, with its lags, ‘has to be preemptive’
This article is for subscribers only.
Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland President Loretta Mester said she agrees with Fed chair nominee Jerome Powell that the case for a December interest-rate increase is coming together and reiterated the central bank needs to keep tightening gradually to sustain the third-longest U.S. expansion.
“I’ve been on that case for a while, that we really need to be moving interest rates up gradually, given where the economy is,” she said in an interview Thursday on Bloomberg Television. “Growth is at a sustainable pace. The labor market has continued to improve. Inflation is below our target, no doubt, but it is on a path to moving up gradually to 2 percent.”