.
Comments from Daly on Bloomberg TV:
- Hard to imagine anything that could derail Sept rate cut
- Time to adjust policy is upon us
- Don’t want to keep making policy tighter as inflation comes down
- The risks to our goals are now balanced
- Most likely outcome is that we continue to see gradual inflation slowing, sustainable pace of labor market growth
- If labor market weakens more than anticipated, we we would need to be more aggressive
- We do know one thing, the direction of rates is down
- I don’t want to declare that we’re on the path to neutral
- Policy rate is highly restrictive, we need to ‘right-size’ it
- I see further signs that the labor market is slowing as unwelcome
- We don’t want to see additional weakness in the labor market
- We will find the neutral rate as we go, we have a long ways to go to get to 2.50% or 3%
- I think we’re close to trend, around 1.5-2%.
- NFP was inconsistent with other indicators, the revisions bring it back into line
Daly last spoke on August 18 and called for a ‘prudent’ approach to lowering rates.
Like Powell, she didn’t include anything like ‘gradual’ or ‘patient’ when talking about rate cuts. That’s another strong hint that 50 bps is in play, though it certainly doesn’t sound like her base case.
Morevoer, there is a clear Fed put in play as she talked about being more aggressive if the labor market weakens.
