Fed’s Kashkari: Inflation is not being driven by wages

Minneapolis Federal Reserve (Fed) President Neel Kashkari is out with a barrage of comments on the central bank’s inflation outlook, in his appearance ahead of Thursday’s Consumer Price Index (CPI) data release from the United States.

Key quotes

Inflation is not being driven by wages.

Today's inflation is caused by supply chain challenges, stimulus, Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

Wages are trying to catch up to inflation, not driving it.

Our traditional models to analyze economy are not working very well right now.

Our economy's potential is lower today because of the pandemic.

Fed's job is to bring demand down to balance to lower level of supply.

We will do what we need to do to bring inflation back down.

Once we do I would expect interest rates to normalize.

we are going to get inflation back down.

if we get further help on the supply side that increases the probability of a soft landing.

we will do everything we can to achieve a soft landing while getting inflation down - its not entirely up to the Fed though.

I wish we had begun tightening policy sooner.

even if we had started to tighten earlier we would still have high inflaiton.

some things are out of our contrl on inflation.