国际英语新闻:U.S. Fed's new forward guidance on rates could have been stronger: Fed official

WASHINGTON, Sept. 18 (Xinhua) -- Neel Kashkari, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, said on Friday that the central bank's new forward guidance on interest rates could have been stronger to avoid premature tightening of monetary policy.

"While I believe the statement is a positive step forward in putting those lessons into practice, I would have preferred the Committee make a stronger commitment to not raising rates until we were certain to have achieved our dual mandate objectives," Kashkari wrote in an online essay.

Kashkari was one of two regional bank presidents who voted against the policy statement of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), the Fed's policy-making committee, issued Wednesday following a two-day meeting.

In that statement, the FOMC said that the benchmark interest rate would remain near zero "until labor market conditions have reached levels consistent with the committee's assessments of maximum employment and inflation has risen to 2% and is on track to moderately exceed 2% for some time."

"This new language still relies on the Committee to assess whether we are at maximum employment and whether inflation is expected to climb. As I just reviewed, those are difficult judgments to make in real time," Kashkari argued.

The Fed official preferred that the central bank would pledge to keep interest rates near zero "until core inflation has reached 2 percent on a sustained basis."

"By eliminating both the direct reference to our assessment of maximum employment and any forecast of inflation climbing, this proposed language guards against the risk of underestimating slack in the labor market," he explained.

"We would only lift off once we had demonstrated that we really were at maximum employment, because core inflation would have had to actually hit or exceed 2 percent on a sustained basis in order to lift off," he said.

Most Fed officials expected interest rates to stay near zero over the next three years, even if inflation reaches 2 percent and the unemployment falls to around 4 percent, according to updated projections released by the Fed on Wednesday.