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Full speech here.

Cleveland Fed President Loretta Mester said she’s “comfortable with tapering some time this year”. She wanted it “completed by the middle of next year”. She added that there is “no need” for the kind of accommodation as “at the height of the crisis”.

Mester said she is watching “if one-off price increases become embedded in inflation expectations.” She is “very watchful” on the inflation side and she now thinks “it will be more prolonged”.

Philadelphia Fed President Patrick Harker said he’s “still supportive of moving the taper along”, because he didn’t think asset purchase is “doing a whole lot right now”. He added that Fed should finish tapering before considering raising interest rates.

He said the Fed has achieved “substantial further progress on inflation” already. There is “some evidence that inflationary pressure “may not be so transitory”. Meanwhile, the job market is changing the people’s thinking about what a job is has changed too.

Boston Fed President Raphael Bostic he’s “comfortable with an October timeline” for starting tapering if August job growth could match the near 1m number as with the previous two months. Also, once the tapering starts, he was “definitely looking to get this done as quickly as possible”, and put a full end to the asset purchases “toward the end of Q1” of 2022.

He also said that the spread of the Delta variant had not changed his economic outlook in any fundamental way. “What I have seen is some suggestion that things are slowing down, but they are still just slowing from extremely high levels. I have not seen big changes in the underlying dynamic,” Bostic added.

Dallas Fed President Robert Kaplan told CNBC that by and large, businesses are “weathering Delta at least as well as previous surges”. Businesses and consumers are learning to adapt well. There is no demand problem in the economy too.

He added that it would be “a lot healthier if Fed begins to wean economy off asset purchases”. Kaplan said he “would prefer to start taper soon but do it over plus or minus eight months, although I remain open-minded.” September meeting would remain his preference to announce tapering.

St. Louis Federal Reserve president James Bullard repeated his call for tapering to end asset purchase by the early next year, as “we don’t need the asset purchases at this point.”

“I think a lot depends on whether inflation going to moderate in 2022 or not. I’m a little skeptical that it is. I think we’re going to get at least 2.5% inflation in 2022, maybe higher than that and there’s some risk to the upside on that,” Bullard said.

“We will be able to get to a good consensus on the committee and get to a good wind-down process. It does seem that we are coalescing around a plan,” Bullard said

Kansas City Fed President Esther George told Bloomberg that the spike in Covid is a “risk to the outlook”, but her contacts in the region said the economy “continues to grow at a strong rate”, consumers are “still spending” and labor markets is “continuing to heal”. The outlook “remains a positive one”. The virus is not expected to derail the economy”.

George also maintained that the progress the economy has made suggests “we’ve come to a point where we can begin to ease up on the amount of accommodation”. It’s “time to begin to make those adjustments” on asset purchases.

As policymakers are coming into the September meeting, she said, we will continue to talk about how the economy has unfolded and the timing for adjustments to those asset purchases”.