At their most recent meeting, Fed officials “stressed that substantially more evidence of progress across a broader range of prices would be required to be confident that inflation was on a sustained downward path.”
The minutes revealed that a few Fed officials wanted to hike interest rates by 50 basis points, a more aggressive approach than the 25 basis point hike the Federal Open Market Committee went with.
The meeting came before recent data showing that inflation rose 6.4 percent annually in January, coming in only slightly below December’s reading and above analyst predictions. It also predates blowout jobs data pointing to a booming U.S. economy.
One of the officials pushing for a larger rate hike was St. Louis Fed President James Bullard, who told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Wednesday that more aggressive action is needed to slow the economy and bring down inflation toward the Fed’s 2 percent target.
“Our risk now is inflation doesn’t come down and reaccelerates, and then what do you do?” he said.
If the Fed accelerates its rate hikes, the central bank could risk sending the economy into a recession that would push millions of Americans out of their jobs.
But Fed officials have made it clear that the risk of persistent inflation outweighs recession fears.
