Factors pushing U.S. inflation higher are likely to ebb at the start of 2022, said Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco President Mary Daly.
“There’s just going to be a sequence of these temporary factors that are going to persist probably through the end of the year,” Daly said Friday in an interview with Bloomberg News. “They will start to roll off at the beginning of next year. How many of them will roll off or whether other bottlenecks will emerge as we start to get the economy back into shape and get back into recovery is hard to say.”
Daly, a voter this year on monetary policy, said she expects inflation to remain elevated through the end of 2021 and that a variety of pressures are adding to price increases right now, including supply-chain constraints in shipping and semiconductor manufacturing and the so-called base effect of comparing this year’s prices to last year’s pandemic-induced declines.
Fed officials have vowed to maintain massive bond purchases until achieving “substantial further progress” on employment and inflation, but have a range of views on when that test will be met.
Daly said monetary policy is in a good place right now and that policy makers need to be patient in light of the more than 8 million people who are still unemployed compared with pre-pandemic levels. Despite some “frothy” spots in financial markets, overall they’re also in a good place, she said.
