Kansas City Fed president Jeff Schmid said Friday he would prefer to hold interest rates steady and not cut rates until there is "convincing" evidence inflation is dropping.
He cited the resilience of the US economy and inflation running above the Fed’s 2% target as reasons for his cautious stance.
Inflation, he said, has surprised to the upside since the beginning of the year and has run at roughly 4% since the first quarter.
"Rather than preemptively adjust the policy rate, I would prefer to be patient and wait for clear and convincing evidence that inflation is on track to hit our 2% target before adjusting the stance of policy," Schmid said during a speech before the Agricultural Commodity Futures Conference in Kansas.
Schmid’s comments come as investors have scaled back bets on the number and timing of interest rate cuts for 2024 following another hotter-than-expected inflation reading this week.
The Consumer Price Index (CPI) rose 3.5% over the prior year in March, an acceleration from February's 3.2% annual gain in prices and more than economists expected.
The year-over-year change in the so-called core CPI — which excludes volatile food and energy prices — was 3.8%, the same level as it was in February but a tenth of a percent higher than expected.
Meanwhile, San Francisco Fed President Mary Daly also said Friday while speaking at a California conference that there is no rush to cut rates, reminding investors that the CPI report is only one data point and the Fed is looking at a range of indicators.
Overall Daly said she sees a strong job market, robust consumer spending, good growth, and inflation that is not falling at a rapid pace like it was the second half of last year.
"It says there's absolutely in my mind no urgency to adjust the policy rate. Policy is in a good place right now," said Daly. "I need to be fully confident that it is on track to come down to 2% ... before we would consider a rate cut."
When asked whether she has scaled back the number of rate cuts she sees this year from three to two, she said, “What we will do by the end of the year, I think really at the moment is less relevant than what are we going to do in response to this incoming information ... there's a lot of work to do before we can be confident that we have price stability."
However, she added that the movement of inflation down to 2% was always going to be a "bumpy ride," and there's no reason to be surprised that it's happening now.
When it comes to inflation, Schmid of the Kansas City Fed said he is watching whether strength in the job market is pushing up prices of services via higher wages and whether more people join the job market.