St. Louis Federal Reserve President James Bullard on Tuesday said he favors starting the turn to tighter U.S. monetary policy with successive rate increases at the Fed’s March, May, and June meetings, before assessing whether the pace of inflation requires more aggressive steps from there.
But he pushed back against the idea of kicking off the tightening cycle with a half-percentage point hike in March, noting that markets have on their own started to push up borrowing costs already, and said that how high the Fed will ultimately need to lift rates remains an “open question.”