Not much reason to stop raising rates if inflation keeps escalating

“We need to raise rates as fast as feasible but you don’t want to break things,” Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond President Thomas Barkin said on Tuesday, as reported by Reuters.

Additional takeaways

“Goods demand should come back to something like normal.”

“Services inflation interacts a lot with labor market.”

If inflation keeps escalating, not much reason to stop raising rates.”

“Our difficult task is there could be a couple of strong inflation readings interspersed with weak ones.”

“I ask myself if we have real rates where we need them to have impact on the US economy we need to.”

“Urgency is high on getting inflation down.”

“Hard to put a timetable on when inflation will get back to 2%.”

“Tweaking balance sheet reduction could be sensible but it’s down the road.”

“I am still sceptical on the need for central bank digital currency.”

Market reaction

The US Dollar Index recovered modestly after these comments and was last seen posting small daily losses at 104.30.