By Elizabeth Dilts Marshall and Niket Nishant
(Reuters) – Wells Fargo & Co CEO warned on Wednesday that the Federal Reserve would find it “extremely difficult” to manage a soft landing of the economy as the central bank seeks to douse the inflation fire with jumbo interest rate hikes.
The CEO of the fourth-largest U.S. lender also said that Wells Fargo is seeing a direct impact from inflation on consumers’ spending, particularly on fuel and food.
“The scenario of a soft landing is … extremely difficult to achieve in the environment that we’re in today,” Wells Fargo Chief Executive Officer, Charlie Scharf, said at a conference.
“The economy does need to slow in order to tame inflation. If there is a short recession, that’s not all that deep… there will be some pain as you go through it, overall, everyone will be just fine coming out of it,” he added.
Scharf’s comments come a day after U.S. President Joe Biden met with Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell to discuss inflation, which is hovering at 40-year highs.
The Fed is under pressure to decisively make a dent in an inflation rate that is running at more than three times its 2% goal and has caused a jump in the cost of living for Americans. It faces a difficult task in dampening demand enough to curb inflation while not causing a recession.
Scharf said while the overall consumer spending is strong, growth is slowing.
“Corporations are still spending, where they can they’re increasing inventories … we do expect the consumer and ultimately businesses to weaken, which is part of what the Fed is trying to engineer but hopefully in a constructive way,” he added.
(Reporting by Elizabeth Dilts Niket Nishant; Writing by Denny Thomas; Editing by Nick Zieminski)
