Ex-BOE’s Blanchflower: Fed making a big policy error by raising interest rates

Former Bank of England (BOE) MPC member and now a professor at Dartmouth College, David Blanchflower, crossed the wires earlier today, expressing his take on the Fed’s rate hike stance in an interview with Busniess Insider.

Key Quotes:

The Fed is vastly overestimating the labour market's true strength by focusing too heavily on the historically low headline unemployment rate ... the economy is still too weak to sustain full employment, and policymakers are not doing enough about it.

“Why are you raising rates?” he said. “Inflation is weak because we’re in a cyclical down point — there’s much more slack than the unemployment rate suggests.”