If you didn’t get the memo from the Federal Reserve’s official stat🔜ements and eꦍconomic projections this week, a pair of officials drove the message home on Friday: Interest rates are staying higher for longer.

Michelle Bowman, a member of the central bank’s board of governors, and Susan Collins, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, both took hawkish tones in speeches at the end of the week. The pair addressed whether the Fed will have to raise its key i✤nterest rate yet again in its fight to subdue inflation.

“Inflation is still too high, and I expect it will likely be appropriate for the Committee to raise rates further and hold them at a res🌄trictive level for some time to return inflation to our 2 percent goal in a timely way,” said Bowman in a speech to bankers in Colorado.

Bowman is a member of the Federal Ope🐻n Market Committee that votes on setting interest rates, while Collins currently is not. (The group has a rotating membership tha🌳t will include the Boston Fed in 2025.)

“I expect rates may have to stay higher, and for longer, than previous projections had suggested, and further tightening is certainly not off the table,” 🌜Collins said. “Policymakers will stay the course to achieve the Fed’s mandate.”

The remarks followed a meeting Wednesday in which the central bank held the fed funds rate steady, maintaining a 22-year high, while projecting that the rate would have to stay higher for a longer time than they had previously estimated.

Fed officials have been raising the rate, pushing up borrowing costs on all kinds of loans, to slow the economy and reduce consumer price increases that are still running at 澳洲幸运5官方开奖结果体彩网:3.7% over the last year, well abo🔯ve the Fed’s goal of 2% annual inflation. 🎃;

Mary Daly, President of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, not currently a voting member but scheduled for a committee slot in 2024, also spoke Friday, and was less defin💜itive about whether more interest rate hikes would be needed, and how long they’d need to stay high.

“We will not be satisfied that we are where we need to be until we're confident that (inflation is) on the path back to price stability,” she said at a fireside chat event in Phoenix, Arizona.