Boston Fed President Wants CB to Focus on Low Inflation

The Fed should fight low inflation as vigorously as it would a too rapid run-up in prices or risk the same sort of prolonged slow growth plaguing Japan and Europe, Boston Federal Reserve bank president Eric Rosengren said on Monday.

Rosengren, in remarks at Washington and Lee University devoted to the potential costs of inflation that remains stuck below the Fed’s two percent target, said the Fed’s own credibility was at stake. Failure to get inflation to target, he said, raised the risk that investors and consumers would slip into deflationary thinking, changing their spending and investment patterns in ways that would further undermine growth.

“Japan’s experience and now Europe’s current situation both indicate that indifference to very low inflation rates can generate a significant loss of confidence in the ability of a central bank to hit its inflation goal,” Rosengren said, noting that low bond yields globally indicate investors have “little expectation” the Fed and other major central banks will be successful in lifting prices.

 
He repeated his call for the Fed to remain patient in raising rates until it is more certain that inflation will rise to the Fed’s target. As it stands, he said, a collection of global and domestic forces are conspiring against that – from the fall in commodity prices to slow growth among U.S. trading partners and the absence, so far, of broadbased wage increases in the United States.

via Reuters

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