Philadelphia Fed President Patrick Harker said, “in the upcoming months, in light of the cumulative tightening we have achieved, I expect we will slow the pace of our rate hikes as we approach a sufficiently restrictive stance.” Next year, “I expect we will hold at a restrictive rate for a while to let monetary policy do its work,” he added.

“As long as we are moving consistently and meaningfully to collapse inflation down, I think again we can continue to raise as we need to but also pause when it makes sense along that path,” Harker explained. “I just don’t think we need to go way up…and way down, that doesn’t make sense to me, policy wise.”

Harker also noted there are signs of deceleration in the economy. “Credit card purchase data indicate that consumer spending, which comprises around 70 per cent of economic activity in the United States, is slowing, with services and retail leading the decline,” he said. “Investment in housing has weakened, and even the boom in manufacturing, which has buoyed the economy, is starting to wane.”

Fed Vice Chair Lael Brainard said yesterday, “I think it will probably be appropriate soon to move to a slower pace of increases, but I think what’s really important to emphasize is… we have additional work to do.”

“It’s really going to be an exercise on watching the data carefully and trying to assess how much restraint there is and how much additional restraint is going to be necessary, and sustained for how long, and those are the kinds of judgments that lie ahead for us,” she said.

“It makes sense to move to a more deliberate and a more data dependent pace as we continue to make sure that there’s restraint that will bring inflation down over time,” she said.

“As we go forward…risks are going to be two sided if we get into more restrictive or further into restrictive territory,” she said, “so we’ll be balancing those considerations.”

Fed Governor Christopher Waller said over the weekend, “we’re at a point we can start thinking maybe of going to a slower pace,” but “we’re not softening”.

“Quit paying attention to the pace and start paying attention to where the endpoint is going to be,” he urged. “Until we get inflation down, that endpoint is still a ways out there.”

Last week’s CPI report was “good, finally, that we saw some evidence of inflation starting to come down, but I just cannot stress [enough] this is one data point. We’re going to need to see a continued run of this kind of behavior and inflation slowly starting to come down, before we really start thinking about taking our foot off the brakes here,” he said.