No reason to halt rate cuts, says San Francisco Fed's Daly

by Laura Curtis

Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco President Mary Daly said she expected the US central bank would continue cutting interest rates to guard against further weakening in the labor market.

“So far, I haven’t seen any information that would suggest we wouldn’t continue to reduce the interest rate.” Daly said Monday at the Wall Street Journal’s TechLive conference in Laguna Beach, California. “This is a very tight interest rate for an economy that already is on a path to 2% inflation, and I don’t want to see the labor market go further.”

Policymakers at their meeting last month began lowering interest rates for the first time since the onset of the pandemic. They cut their benchmark by a half percentage point, to a range of 4.75% to 5%, as concern mounted that the labor market was deteriorating and as inflation cooled close to the Fed’s 2% goal. 

Economic data since then has shown that hiring in recent months was stronger than initially reported, and market participants now anticipate a smaller, quarter-point cut at the Fed’s Nov. 6-7 policy meeting.

The San Francisco Fed chief said the decision to cut by a half-point as opposed to a quarter-point was a “close call,” though she came down strongly on the side of a half-point reduction. She didn’t offer any comments on the pace of cuts going forward.

“We will continue to adjust policy to make sure it fits the economy that we have and the one that’s evolving,” Daly said.

Fed officials speaking earlier Monday in other venues signaled they favor a slower tempo of rate reductions than that implied by September’s half-point cut.

Dallas Fed President Lorie Logan said officials should proceed carefully amid a high level of economic uncertainty, arguing “a strategy of gradually lowering the policy rate toward a more normal or neutral level can help manage the risks and achieve our goals.”

Neel Kashkari, president of the Minneapolis Fed, said he is “forecasting some more modest cuts over the next several quarters to get to something around neutral, and Kansas City Fed chief Jeff Schmid said he would like to “avoid outsized moves, especially given uncertainty over the eventual destination of policy.”

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