Fed's Daly: We don’t want to declare victory on inflation coming down

There’s good news on the month-to-month data that consumers and business are getting some relief, but inflation remains far too high and not near our price stability goal.

Still, ‘core’ prices — which strip out volatile items such as energy and food — climbed higher, led by an uptick in services inflation that Daly said showed little sign of moderating.

This is why we don’t want to declare victory on inflation coming down.

We’re not near done yet.

There is a lot of uncertainty, so leaping ahead with great confidence that [a 0.75 percentage point rate rise] is what we need and being prescriptive would not be optimal policy.

We have a lot of work to do. I just don’t want to do it so reactively that we find ourselves spoiling the labor market.

If we tip the economy over and [people] lose jobs, then we haven’t really made them better off.

What we need is not a good report on inflation. It’s encouraging, but it’s not evidence of the goal we really want.

Instead, Daly is looking for the data in the aggregate to affirm the Fed is ‘on a path to bring inflation down substantially and achieve our price stability target’.