(Reuters) – Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank President Neel Kashkari on Monday said he felt the stock market selloff that followed Fed Chair Jerome Powell’s hawkish speech on Friday shows investors understand the central bank is serious reducing inflation.
“I was actually happy to see how Chair Powell’s Jackson Hole speech was received,” Kashkari told Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast. “People now understand the seriousness of our commitment to getting inflation back down to 2%.”
All three U.S stock benchmarks lost more than 3% on Friday after Powell told the annual central bankers conference in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, that the Fed would raise interest rates as high as needed to slow growth and soften the labor market.
He also said the Fed would keep policy restrictive “for some time” to bring down inflation which is running at more than three times the Fed’s 2% goal.
“I certainly was not excited to see the stock market rallying after our last Federal Open Market Committee meeting,” he added, referring to the Fed’s policy-setting panel, which last met July 26-27 and delivered a second straight 75-basis-point rate hike.
Powell at the time said the Fed would at some point begin to slow the pace of interest-rate hikes, a point he also made on Friday, even as he emphasized that the Fed’s rate hikes would mean “some pain” for households and businesses.
(Reporting by Ann Saphir in Berkeley, Calif.; Editing by Matthew Lewis)
