FED: Cleveland's Hammack Tells WSJ Fed Can Be "Very Patient" On Cuts
Updates wording after WSJ corrects quote to "modestly" restrictive rather than "moderately".
Cleveland Fed Pres Hammack (not a 2025 voter) continues to sound hawkish in a WSJ interview, following her surprise dissent in December to the 25bp rate cut. She emphasizes patience in considering future cuts, describing current policy as only modestly restrictive, but also noting that the rise in longer-end yields represents a tightening of financial conditions that will help dampen inflation. Overall she doesn't sound opposed to further cuts per se, but would require significant convincing from the data. A couple of key quotes:
- On her December dissent: "For me, that December conversation was really about, did you need to do it now, or could you be more patient and wait and see."
- On further rate cuts: "We can be very patient...we still have an inflation problem. We still have a rate-of-change problem that we need to address... we've made amazing progress on it, but we need to continue to finish the job."
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