Fed Officials at Odds Over Rate Timing

Federal Reserve officials on Thursday were again at public odds over when the U.S. central bank should start raising rates, underscoring the difficult task ahead for Fed Chair Janet Yellen as she tries to build consensus for a rate hike sometime later this year.  Increasingly it appears she may need to play tie-breaker on a committee split over whether the greater risk is in waiting too long to raise rates, or in pulling the trigger too soon.

And the division among Fed officials over whether recent weak U.S. economic data is a temporary setback or a sign of more persistent sluggishness puts a renewed premium on Yellen’s read of incoming data in the next two months.  The Fed’s June meeting, Yellen said last month, is the earliest date for a start to the Fed’s first round of monetary policy tightening in more than a decade.

On Thursday, Vice Chair Stanley Fischer emphasized the determining role of data on the exact timing of a rate hike at some point later this year. But he gave no sense of when he thought that would be.  “We’ll try to do it at the best possible time and we would like to see the economy beginning to grow again,” Fischer said on CNBC.