Fed's Daly, Mester guide towards more interest rate hikes

Two top US central bank officials guided towards more tightening moves in 2023.

In an interview at the Brookings Institution, the head of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, Mary Daly, said that prices were "persistently" high, Marketwatch.com reported.

So in her opinion it was perfectly reasonable to project a "couple" of additional interest rate hikes.

A tad earlier, her counterpart at the Minneapolis Fed, Loretta Mester, told Bloomberg said she expected inflation to fall further, but that it would take longer to reach the central bank's 2% target.

She said that the Fed funds rate would need to rise "somewhat further" as the economy had been showing more underlying strength than expected while inflation had remained "stubbornly high" with progress on core inflation "stalling".

Neither Daly nor Mester were voting members on the Federal Open Market Committee in 2023.