Fed's Kugler says she strongly supported half-point rate cut

Federal Reserve Governor Adriana Kugler said on Wednesday that she "strongly supported" the Fed's decision to cut the interest rates by a half point last week. Kugler further stated that it will be appropriate to make additional rate cuts if inflation continues to ease as expected, per Bloomberg.

Key quotes

Says she will support additional rate cuts going forward.

Fed should keep focusing on reducing inflation and also shift attention to maximum employment.

Estimates of PCE inflation at 2.2% in August, Core PCE at 2.7% in signs of progress towards goal.

May take some time to feel that prices are back to normal.

There has been a significant moderation in the labor market recently.

Expect spending to grow at a somewhat more moderate pace moving forward.

Fed must now 'balance. Its focus' is to continue to make progress on inflation while avoiding unnecessary pain in the economy.

We're at a place where we don't want labor market to weaken further.

Makes sense to shift attention to the employment mandate.

Inflation measures excluding housing are near 2%, but that's not what we target.

We are making very good progress, but not at 2% yet.

I don't see that we will overshoot on inflation.

It will still take us some time to get to 2% inflation.

We have begun to recalibrate rates.

We need to continue normalizing rates.

Maybe some Fed policymakers would be willing to move expected 2025 rate cuts forward to 2024, or vice versa, depending on data.

We don't pay a whole lot of attention to the neutral rate because there is a lot of uncertainty about it.

Below 100K monthly job gain would be 'very low', must be mindful of potential downward revisions.

The breakeven number for monthly job gains is anywhere from 100K to 240K.

The policy is restrictive.

With disinflation, we need to cut even to just keep where we are in terms of restiveness.

Market reaction

The US Dollar Index (DXY) is trading 0.01% higher on the day at 100.93, as of writing.