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.”
