Dallas Fed President Robert Kaplan “a lot has changed since December” in the US, with strong fiscal stimulus, fast vaccinations and eased restrictions. Hence, “it will make sense to at least start discussing how we would go about adjusting these purchases and start having those discussions sooner rather than later.”

On the other hand, San Francisco Fed President Mary Daly said the right time to start tapering is “when we are much closer to achieving our dual mandate goals than we are now… We have an optimistic outlook, a long way to go, and we are not out of the woods yet… we have only had a couple of months of really good data.”

Minneapolis Fed President Neel Kashkari said Fed should “not cut off the recovery prematurely.” “Today, roughly eight million Americans are out of work who were working before the pandemic. I assume that those folks want to work again,” he said. “How long is it going to take to bring all of those folks back into the labor market and really achieve full employment? We’ll see. It may take a few years.”

New York Fed President John Williams said in a a speech that as the economy further reopens, “I expect inflation to run somewhat above our 2 percent longer-run goal for the remainder of this year.” But he emphasized “not to overreact to this volatility in prices resulting from the unique circumstances of the pandemic”, but focus on the “underlying trends”.

“My expectation is that once the price reversals and short-run imbalances from the economy reopening have played out, inflation will come back down to about 2 percent next year,” he added.

Williams also said the economy is now “positioned to grow quickly”. “I expect that the rate of economic growth this year will be the fastest that we’ve experienced since the early 1980s. And that’s not only a forecast—we are already seeing signs of this pivot to strong growth in the economic statistics,” he added.

Full speech here.

Richmond Fed President Thomas Barkin told CNBC yesterday, “we will see price pressure this year”, with a “very strong demand situation” and “constraints in supply”. “When those things happen, you’re definitely going to see price pressure,” he added.

“Inflation is a recurring phenomenon. Prices go up this year, prices go up next year,” he said. “I think it’s fair to argue the question of whether the combination of supply chain constraints and stimulus-driven price increases actually revert next year.”

Fed Chair Jerome Powell said in a speech, while the US economy is “not out of the woods yet”, “real progress” was being made and economic outlook has “clearly brightened”. The economy is “reopening, bringing stronger economic activity and job creation.”.

But at “street level”, lives and livelihoods have been affected in ways that vary from “person to person, family to family, and community to community”. “The economic downturn has not fallen evenly on all Americans, and those least able to bear the burden have been the hardest hit,” Powell added.

Full speech here.