克利夫兰联储主席哈马克：通胀过高过久，是时候加息了

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As clouds rolled in late last night, Fed officials were gathering in the main hall. And joining us now is one of those Fed officials, Cleveland Fed President Beth Hammock. It is so good to have you, President Hammock, on set with us this morning. You have been very vocal about your desire to raise rates, that you think that the inflation has been too hot for too long. Have you heard anything at this meeting that changes your mind?

Well, the meeting starts in earnest this morning uh with the chairman's speech and that'll be the kickoff. Um the data that I've seen since our last meeting has been to me very much in line with the picture that I was seeing before. And of course, I'm setting my my policy views based on the forecast of where I think policy is head, where I think the economy is headed rather than where we were over the past several years.

But we've been missing on our inflation target for more than 5 years. My forecast is that we're going to continue to end this year around 3% inflation and by the end of 27 we'll hopefully get down to the mid 2 and a halfs um the mid 2% but that's not meeting our 2% objective. So to me uh you know there's no tension in our mandate. We've got an employment picture that's right around my estimate of maximum employment. It's been stable and in balance for the past 12 months and we've been missing on the inflation side.

I don't see restrictiveness in the markets. When I talk to people in the capital markets, what I'm hearing is that capital is free flowing. Investors are looking uh to put more capital to work. businesses are looking to to make bigger investments. Um, and so I think we need to put some restriction into policy. And so I believe it's time to act for us to do that. The longer that we wait to get inflation under control, the more pain is felt by everyday Americans and the more difficult it may be for us to ultimately get it back down.

We were talking last night about the meanings of the word reaction function and some of our colleagues were saying, "Wow, that's kind of a fancy name, super technical,

super technical name, mathematical formula."

What is it that Kevin Worsh is not doing? I mean, what do how do you define what Wall Street is looking for and how do you put your own views into that?

Well, I I can't tell you anymore what Wall Street's looking for because now I'm on the policy maker side. I'm no longer on the market participant side. Um, but I can tell you I view communicating about my viewpoints as a critical part of the job. I think talking to the public, listening to the public, hearing what they're experiencing, hearing how they're seeing the economy unfold is a critical part of what I do every day.

And I need to help put my views out there so that businesses and households can make better informed decisions. I like to tell people when new data comes in, how is that going to change my perspective? How might that change the decisions that I and maybe my colleagues are going to make? Um because I feel like that will help them to manage their businesses and their household finances. Well, when you look at what uh the chair might have to say today, kind of the bottom line question for other members of the open market committee is how do you feel about the idea of not giving forward guidance?

And particularly given your background, having the bond market tell the Fed what it thinks is happening in the economy.

Well, the markets are definitely one component that I look at. financial conditions and FCI indices are something that I spent spend time looking at to get a sense of how monetary policy is transmitting into the real economy. Um, but having spent 30 years in markets, I can tell you that market participants tend to be focused on making money for themselves and their clients. And they do that by betting on what the Fed will do, not what the Fed should do.

And so I think markets are an important compliment, but not a substitute for the Fed. And for

selling yourself 30 years, you were sterling in the repo market at Goldman Sachs. There's no one in the history of the Fed that understands short-term paper like you do. You got it down. You But it's true. You underell yourself.

I think we have a lot of experts. We The staff is incredible at the Fed. That has been one of the

I agree on that. Plus, you're out of Cleveland Fed where you invented in 1983 how we look at inflation with the Cleveland series. Do you still see trust in the market before and after this speech and the litmus paper, the the narrowness of the repo market? Do we still still see trust in what we're doing? I think our credibility comes from our our ability to deliver on our commitment to the dual mandate and we are committed to delivering on bringing inflation back down to target.

So this is critical. Ed Yard Denny publishing I was literally on you had the Gulf Stream. Sorry I was coming out United slow motion and Ed Yard Denny published that look where nominal GDP is. We have plenty of room. Let's not fear it. Beth says raise interest rates. Let's raise them because we're nowhere near nominal GDP. Discuss that dynamic. Um, I think we I think what I'm seeing is that there's not a lot of restriction in the economy.

Um, you see in businesses going out and raising lots of capital, trying to make new investments. That is good for growth. That can be helpful. But as as Ed Yardini points out, we've been seeing GDP growth coming in above what what I'd think of as kind of long-term averages. When you have that kind of growth, that can put pressure on inflation. That can put pressure on people chasing prices higher. And what I hear when I'm out in the district is I hear from businesses that they're seeing their input costs go up.

I was talking with a auto parts manufacturer in Northeast Ohio who was telling me he's seeing double-digit inflation in some of his info costs. He's trying to pass those on, but it's hard to get those those increments to to go through. Do you actually see signs of froth in the market? Things that actually are excesses that need to be taken out.

Um, that's not what I'm focused on from a policy restriction perspective. It's more about getting inflation under control. But I guess that the question is what exactly would raising rates do if it can't necessarily affect the price of oil? It can't necessarily affect the price of tariffs and frankly it's not exactly going to cretail AI borrowing if there is all of this backlog that we're seeing from the likes of Nvidia and other semiconductors.

We have one blunt tool. We have interest rates. That is our main policy tool that we have. We have the balance sheet. We have our communications. That's kind of the full suite, but primarily we use interest rates. And so when I see a an economy that to me seems like we've got inflation too high for too long, what monetary policy would tell you to do is to raise interest rates.

Do you think that interest rates are still the primary tool of this Federal Reserve given some of the questions around exactly what Fed Chairman Kevin Worsh plans to do?

I think they're the clearest, most transparent, easiest to communicate tool that we have. I think we have a long history in knowing how raising interest rates or lowering interest rates can impact the economy broadly. The balance sheet that we have today is the confluence of a lot of different things that have happened over time starting back in the the GFC. Um it's you know both some amount of QE that happened so actually policy when you were at the zero lower bound.

It's some amount of plumbing of making sure that you've got ample reserves in the in the system and it's some amount of market functioning purchases. So all three of those have sort of gotten us to where we are today. Um but we don't really know a lot about how changes in the balance sheet will flow through into the broader ec

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