Fed officials keep eye on mid-2015 rate rise

[Las Vegas] The Federal Reserve will probably start raising interest rates around the middle of next year, two top officials at the US central bank said on Thursday, although both said the exact timing will depend on the economy. "What we think now is that the capital markets have it more or less right but we don't ourselves know when we're going to do it," Fed Vice Chairman Stanley Fischer said in Washington. "On the basis of our forecasts of the data ... it looks like markets more or less have it right - somewhere in the middle of the year.

The Fed has kept rates near zero since 2008 and has nearly quadrupled its balance sheet to more than US$4 trillion through a series of bond purchase programs in an effort to push borrowing costs down further and boost hiring.

With the US jobless rate at 5.9 per cent and closing in on what the central bank sees as consistent with full employment, officials plan to wrap up their bond buying this month.

Now, investors are rushing to place bets on when rates will rise.

Minutes of the Fed's September meeting released on Wednesday showed several officials worried a troubling global growth backdrop and stronger dollar could undercut the US recovery.

Investors took that to mean the Fed would bide its time on rate hikes, and they sent the dollar down and bid stocks up. Futures markets shifted to point to a September hike from July.

The central bank's only official guidance on the timing is that it would wait a "considerable time" after bond-buying ends, a phrase Fed Chair Janet Yellen indicated earlier this year meant something along the lines of six months.

Fischer took a step that essentially downgraded the value of the phrase, saying it meant somewhere between two to 12 months, putting investors on notice that it will be economic data, not the passage of time, that will drive policy change.

Speaking in Las Vegas, San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank President John Williams said exactly that. "Likely around the middle of next year is a reasonable guess to my mind," said Williams, who will rotate into a voting spot on the Fed's policy-setting panel next year. "If the economy or inflation heat up faster than I expect, we should lift rates sooner," he said, but he added that if progress on those fronts slow, the liftoff should be delayed.

William Dudley, the head of the New York Fed, earlier this week also pointed to mid-2015 as the likely rate-hike date.

St. Louis Fed President James Bullard on Thursday said financial markets were making a "mistake" in betting that borrowing costs would only rise later in 2015. Bullard, citing strengthening gauges of labor markets and inflation, wants the Fed to start raising rates in the first quarter of next year. "When there is a mismatch it doesn't end well," he said at a conference in St Louis sponsored by his regional Fed bank.

But Richmond Fed President Jeffrey Lacker, speaking in Asheville, NC, said he wasn't particularly alarmed. "The gap is most likely accounted for by differences in views on how the data is going to come in," he said.

Mr Lacker, among the most hawkish of Fed policymakers, said he probably is on the "early side" among his colleagues in terms of expectations for when rates should rise.

Still, he said, it's "too soon to draw conclusions."

- REUTERS