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Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland President Loretta Mester said inflation data released earlier Wednesday was terrible, but she wasn’t yet ready to commit to further accelerating central bank interest rate rises to deal with the problem.
The June consumer-price index “was uniformly bad, there was no good news in that report,” Mester said in a Bloomberg radio interview. “Until we get and see convincing evidence that inflation has turned the corner, is on a downward path and is sustainably on a downward path, we just have more work to do.”
But whether the data tipped the Fed from raising rates by three-quarters of a percentage point to a full percentage point at the end of the month remains to be seen, Mester said. “We don’t have to make that decision today, and there’s more data coming out that I’m going to be very attuned to” before making the call, she said.
But she added there has been nothing in the data to say the Fed would need to move less than 75 basis points when the Federal Open Market Committee meets July 26 and July 27. Mester holds a vote on the FOMC this year.
An expanded version of this report appears on WSJ.com.
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