Fed’s Evans Says December Taper Tough to Call

It will be “tough” for the Federal Reserve to have sufficient confidence in the strength of the U.S. recovery by its meeting in December to start scaling back a massive Fed bond-buying campaign, a senior U.S. central banker said on Monday.

“October is a tough one. December? I think we need a couple of good labor reports and evidence of increasing growth, GDP growth. It is probably going to take a few months to sort that one out,” Chicago Federal Reserve President Charles Evans told CNBC television in an interview.

The Fed is buying $85 billion in Treasuries and mortgage-backed securities every month to keep interest rates low and stimulate economic recovery in the United States.

Fed officials hold their next policy meetings later this month and then in December. Evans, one of the 19-member policy-setting committee’s most dovish members, is a voter this year.

“It is very difficult to feel confident in December given that we’re going to repeat part of what just took place in Washington,” Evans said.

via Reuters

Content is for general information purposes only. It is not investment advice or a solution to buy or sell securities. Opinions are the authors; not necessarily that of OANDA Business Information & Services, Inc. or any of its affiliates, subsidiaries, officers or directors. If you would like to reproduce or redistribute any of the content found on MarketPulse, an award winning forex, commodities and global indices analysis and news site service produced by OANDA Business Information & Services, Inc., please access the RSS feed or contact us at info@marketpulse.com. Visit https://www.marketpulse.com/ to find out more about the beat of the global markets. © 2023 OANDA Business Information & Services Inc.

Alfonso Esparza

Alfonso Esparza

Senior Currency Analyst at Market Pulse
Alfonso Esparza specializes in macro forex strategies for North American and major currency pairs. Upon joining OANDA in 2007, Alfonso Esparza established the MarketPulseFX blog and he has since written extensively about central banks and global economic and political trends. Alfonso has also worked as a professional currency trader focused on North America and emerging markets. He has been published by The MarketWatch, Reuters, the Wall Street Journal and The Globe and Mail, and he also appears regularly as a guest commentator on networks including Bloomberg and BNN. He holds a finance degree from the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education (ITESM) and an MBA with a specialization on financial engineering and marketing from the University of Toronto.
Alfonso Esparza