Why the hurry (to raise rates)?

A tentative hypothesis is that of the 12 regional Fed presidents, 10 have never voted for an increase in rates! And some of them are voting members this season (which has three more meetings to go).

Among those are Dennis Lockhart (Atlanta) who last March said:

Dennis Lockhart just entered his ninth year as president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, and during that time he has never voted to raise interest rates. He took the job during the very early days of the financial crisis, and he has never really had the chance. But that is about to change. Mr. Lockhart said in an interview Monday that he expected he would vote to start raising rates by September at the latest.

Today:

Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta President Dennis Lockhart said the economy is ready for the first increase in short-term interest rates in more than nine years and it would take a significant deterioration in the data to convince him not to move in September.

“I think there is a high bar right now to not acting, speaking for myself,” Mr. Lockhart said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal.

And James Bullard of the St Louis Fed who said last Friday:

We are in good shape” for increasing the Fed’s currently near-zero short-term rate target at the Sept. 16-17 central bank gathering, Mr. Bullard said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. He said officials needed to see how growth data released Thursday shaped up before clearing the way to act.

They must be feeling pretty useless, being paid without doing any real work!

2 thoughts on “Why the hurry (to raise rates)?

  1. It’s sad that they won’t learn what kind of mistake they’ve made until they have needlessly created more victims when it’s a lot easier to take a look around to see if there is anything to justify such a plan beforehand. This crop of central bankers is worse than children with matches.

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