(Adds comment in fifth paragraph)
By Ann Saphir
April 11 (Reuters) - Philadelphia Federal Reserve Bank
President Patrick Harker on Tuesday said he feels the U.S.
central bank may soon be done raising interest rates, a year
into its most rapid monetary policy tightening since the 1980s.
"Since the full impact of monetary policy actions can take
as much as 18 months to work its way through the economy, we
will continue to look closely at available data to determine
what, if any, additional actions we may need to take," Harker
said in a speech at the Wharton Initiative on Financial Policy
and Regulation.
"But make no mistake: We are fully committed to bringing
inflation back down to our 2% target."
Harker joined his fellow U.S. central bankers last month in
voting for a quarter of a percentage point increase in the
benchmark overnight interest rate, taking it to a range of 4.75%
to 5.00%.
The Fed signaled at the time that most policymakers expected
one more increase before calling it quits on a rate-hike
campaign that began in March 2022.
In a question-and-answer session following his speech,
Harker said he was among that majority. "I'm in the camp of
getting up above 5 and then sitting there for a while," he said.
Recent inflation readings "show that disinflation is
proceeding slowly - which is disappointing, to say the least,"
Harker said. The Fed targets 2% inflation which, by its
preferred measure, is still running at about 5%.
Still, he said, "we're already seeing promising signs" that
the Fed's rate hikes are working, particularly to bring down
house prices.
Chicago Fed President Austan Goolsbee earlier on Tuesday
said he was focused on parsing the potential impact of tighter
credit conditions on the economy in the run-up to the Fed's May
2-3 meeting.
(Reporting by Ann Saphir; Editing by Chris Reese, Jamie Freed
and Neil Fullick)
