In a Reuters interview, San Francisco Fed President Mary Daly said, “lifting off in March when you have an unemployment rate of 3.9%, and an inflation rate that’s north of our price stability goal of average 2% inflation, to me seems a quite reasonable thing.” But she didn’t offer her prediction on the number of rate hike needed this year.

Daly also said even with the rate hikes, “we are not bridling the economy and starting to restrain it.” Rate would remain well below the “neutral” level of 2.50%. Meanwhile, once Fed has raised rates once or twice, she said, it should start shrinking the balance sheet as a “predictable” manner.

An a CNBC interview, Philadelphia Fed President Patrick Harker said “we do need to take action on inflation. It is more persistent than we thought a while ago. I’ve been off the ‘transitory’ team for a while now”. “Three [hikes] is what I’ve penciled in, but four is not out of the question in my mind,” he said.

But Harker preferred a slower approach regarding balance sheet run-off. He thinks the Fed should wait until it raises rates “for sake of argument 100 basis points,” or four hikes, before starting the wind down the asset purchases. “I don’t want to do that all at once. I think that’s just the wrong way to go,” he said. “Let’s do them in stages.”

Chicago Fed President Charles Evans said, “I readily admit – I have to be humble about this – I did not expect the inflation rates that we’re seeing and they have lasted longer than I expected. And because they have lasted longer, I know that we need to take action more quickly than I would have guessed last year.”

“We need to be adjusting monetary policy to something close to neutral,” he said. “The committee very strongly is expecting two, three, four rate increases this year. We’ll see how it plays out.”

Richmond Fed Bank President Thomas Barkin said yesterday, “the closer that inflation comes back to target levels, the easier it will be to normalize rates at a measured pace,”

“But were inflation to remain elevated and broad-based, we would need to take on normalization more aggressively, as we have successfully done in the past,” he added.

Barkin also said labor shortage is a “long lasting phenomenon”, with “baby boomers retiring” and “immigration slowing”. Officials may need to accept that labor force participation is “stagnant”.

Philadelphia Fed President Patrick Harker said in an FT interview, “I currently have three increases in for this year, and I’d be very open to starting in March. I’d be open to more if that’s required.”

“We don’t want to put the brakes on completely, but we do need to slow down some of the demand,” he said. “We can do something . . . by raising the fed funds rate.”

“Ultimately, what we worry about is that people start to think, ‘Well, inflation is just not going to be at 2 per cent, it’s going to be at 2.5 per cent or 3 per cent going forward’,” he said.

As for the balance sheet run-off, Harker said if could start once interest rates were “sufficiently away” from zero. “I am very much in the camp of communicating over and over how we’re going to do this and then being methodical,” he said.

San Francisco Fed President Mary Daly said inflation is “uncomfortably high” in the US. And, it’s time to “start removing some of the accommodation we’ve been giving to the economy,”

“I definitely see rate increases coming, as early as March even,” she noted. But she didn’t want to predict the number of rate hikes needed for this year.

In the nomination hearing for Fed Vice Chair position, Lael Brainard said, “we are seeing the strongest rebound in growth and decline in unemployment of any recovery in the past five decades.”

“But inflation is too high, and working people around the country are concerned about how far their paychecks will go,” she added. “Our monetary policy is focused on getting inflation back down to 2% while sustaining a recovery that includes everyone. This is our most important task.”

St. Louis Fed President James Bullard said Fed “could begin increasing the policy rate as early as the March meeting in order to be in a better position to control inflation.” He added, ” it makes sense to get going sooner rather than later and so I think March would be a definite possibility.”

“We need to risk manage here. We need to be prepared for the case where inflation does not moderate as much as hoped and instead the Fed has to come in and move inflation closer to the 2% target. How much the Fed has to do and how much natural moderation there will be is very much an open question,” he said.

Separately, Bullard also told WSJ, “I actually now think we should maybe go to four hikes in 2022.”