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A top Federal Reserve official has said inflation could “see-saw” if policymakers cut rates too soon, warning that the descent towards the central bank’s 2 per cent goal was likely to slow in the months ahead.
After surging to its highest level in decades during the summer of 2022, US inflation fell sharply over the second half of last year, paving the way for rate-setters to consider lowering borrowing costs from their current 23-year high of 5.25 to 5.5 per cent.
However, Raphael Bostic, the Atlanta Fed president who will vote on the Federal Open Market Committee’s decisions this year, said he was “expecting to see much slower progression of inflation moving forward”.
There was, he said, “some risks that inflation may stall out altogether”.
Bostic’s remarks came ahead of a December CPI reading, which showed headline inflation drifting up to 3.4 per cent from 3.1 per cent in November.
While the Atlanta Fed president acknowledged that price pressures had fallen faster than he had expected last year, he still thought inflation was likely to be about 2.5 per cent by the end of 2024 and only hit the Fed’s goal in 2025.
Bostic said after the Fed’s December policy vote that he thought rates would need to remain on hold until after the summer. He told the Financial Times that the uncertainty facing the US economy warranted such a cautious approach.
“Inflation must be firmly and surely getting back to our 2 per cent target,” said Bostic. “It would be a bad outcome if we started to ease and inflation started to rise up and down like a see-saw. That would undermine people’s confidence in where the economy is going.”
While rate-setters are growing increasingly confident that price pressures are returning to their pre-pandemic norms, most on the FOMC want to take their time in shifting from their current monetary policy stance.
Investors are hastier, with the market pricing in six quarter-point cuts this year, starting in March. That compares with rate-setters’ expectations of three cuts, while Bostic sees just two.
“Markets hear what we are saying — our projections for rate cuts have been pretty clear,” he said. “But it’s my sense that they believe inflation is going to come down faster than I do.”
The Atlanta Fed president warned that a recent surge in shipping costs on the back of disruption to traffic in the Suez Canal caused by the targeting of vessels by the Houthis would need to be watched “very closely”.
The cost of shipping a 40ft container from the Far East to Europe has soared almost 150 per cent over the past month, according to data from Xeneta, a logistics research firm.
“It will be very interesting to see to what extent the Middle East conflict and attacks on the container ships is starting to show up in the cost structure for businesses in my district,” he said.
Bostic believed that, with unemployment at just 3.7 per cent, the labour market remained too strong for the Fed to shift its focus from inflation to job creation.
“If we look at our employment mandate, we’re hitting that very firmly today,” he said. “But that is not the case for price stability.”
The labour market was no longer as hot as it was, however, with job creation largely confined to the healthcare and government sectors.
“There are signs underneath the hood that some segments of the economy have weakened,” he said, citing manufacturing.
While meetings with business contacts suggested wage growth would moderate this year from current levels of above 4 per cent, he still wanted to ensure labour costs were not so burdensome that they led businesses “to rethink their pricing strategies”.
“I’m not hearing that today,” he said. “But it is something I definitely need to watch out for.”
Bostic said he was taking a closer look at liquidity conditions after some rate-setters said in December that the Fed could soon need to slow the wind-down of its balance sheet.
Under the current terms of the quantitative tightening programme, up to $60bn worth of Treasuries and $35bn of mortgage-backed securities can run off the balance sheet a month. Some think the policy risks triggering spikes in funding markets trying to digest high levels of debt issuance by the US government.
“Today we haven’t really seen any movements in money markets that suggests we’re close to a scenario where we don’t have ample reserves any more,” he said.
“Clearly at some point, there’s going to be a signal that we’re going to get closer to that threshold, and we’re going to have to do some thinking.”