By Ann Saphir
(Reuters) -Dallas Federal Reserve President Lorie Logan on Friday again signaled she would oppose an interest-rate cut in December, after also opposing the Fed’s rate cut in October, because of her concern that inflation is too high, trending upward, and taking too long to get to the Fed’s 2% target.
“As I look to the December meeting, I think it would be hard to support another rate cut unless we were to get convincing evidence that inflation is really coming down faster than my expectations or that we were seeing more than the gradual cooling that we’ve been seeing in the labor market,” she said at an energy conference put on by the Dallas and Kansas City Fed banks.
Logan will not be a voter on rate-setting at the Fed until next year, though non-voters do participate in the Fed’s monetary policy debate and can help shape the thinking at the table.
“Until I see convincing evidence that we are headed all the way back to our 2% target, I really do think modestly restrictive policy is appropriate,” Logan said, in remarks that largely repeated comments she made days after the Fed’s late-October decision to cut the policy rate to the 3.75%-4.00% range to support the labor market.
Logan said the job market is cooling, but gradually and appropriately so because the Fed is also trying to get inflation down and needs to keep short-term borrowing costs high enough to keep some braking power on the economy.
She said she supported the Fed’s September rate cut as insurance against further labor-market weakening, but “it does not seem like a labor market to me that it would be appropriate for further preemptive insurance.”
Instead she said the Fed can monitor the job market risks, “and if we saw more than gradual cooling then I would think it would be you know appropriate to consider another rate cut,” she said.
(Reporting by Ann Saphir, Editing by Franklin Paul and Andrea Ricci )
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