Minneapolis Fed President Neel Kashkari said in a Bloomberg interview, “if we see a few more jobs reports like the one we just got, then I would feel comfortable saying yeah, we are — maybe haven’t completely filled the hole that we’ve been in — but we’ve made a lot of progress, and now, then will be the time to start tapering our asset purchases.”
“I’m not convinced we were actually at maximum employment before the Covid shock hit us. So, that’s exactly why I want us to be really humble about declaring, ‘This is as good as it can get’,” he said.
He added that labor force participation and employment rates have to be “at least back to where they were before” and that’s a “reasonable thing for us to try to achieve.”