By Nick Timiraos
The risks facing the Federal Reserve have "completely flipped around" over the past year, Fed governor Christopher Waller said during remarks on a panel in Rome Monday. Last year, Waller advocated for rate cuts and was "willing to tolerate a longer movement back" to the Fed's 2% inflation goal because a shaky labor market outweighed inflation running above that target, he said.
The Fed cut rates three times from September to December last year. Now, in Waller's telling, the "labor market seems to be stabilizing in the U.S., inflation's been taking off. So then that changes how you might want to think about policy," he said, without outlining a specific policy proposal.
Waller pushed back on the premise of a question about whether the Fed needed to recommit to price stability, as Fed Chairman Kevin Warsh said last week his colleagues have recently done. "I've never been anything but committed to a 2% target," Waller said. "The issue is just how fast we get there."
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