Fed’s Williams says interest rate path is data dependent

(Reuters) -The prospect of the Federal Reserve raising its benchmark interest rate only once more and in a 25 basis point increment is a useful starting point but the central bank’s policy path will depend on incoming data, New York Fed President John Williams said on Tuesday.

“That’s a reasonable starting place. I mean, that’s the median we saw from my colleagues,” Williams said in an interview on Yahoo Finance, referring to the Fed’s median estimate at its last meeting in March of a peak in interest rates in the 5.00%-5.25% range.

The Fed raised rates by 25 basis points to a 4.75%-5.00% range at that meeting. However, it has adopted a more cautious approach following recent banking turmoil, which has raised expectations of a swifter slowdown in the economy as banks become more wary about lending.

Williams repeated comments he made on Monday that he had yet to see much sign of credit conditions tightening and it would take time to see how that played out, while cautioning that inflation still remained too high.

“We have to be driven by the data,” Williams said. “I will say that one thing that we’re paying attention to is credit conditions but also do we really see signs of this underlying inflation coming down?”

He added that employment data for March showed the jobs market was still “very strong” and noted that while goods and commodities inflation has come down, pricing pressures in other areas remain more stubbornly high.

“Some of this core services inflation excluding housing hasn’t budged yet so we’ve got our work cut out for us to get inflation back to 2%,” he said. Inflation by the Fed’s preferred measure is still running at more than twice that target rate.

“So the real question to me is, we’ve gotten to restrictive (on policy), what’s it going to take to be sufficiently restrictive? Do we need to do somewhat more to get there? And obviously, that’ll be driven by the data and the outlook.”

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