By Michael S. Derby
NEW YORK (Reuters) – Federal Reserve Bank of New York President John Williams said Tuesday longer-term inflation expectations have been encouragingly steady, and he welcomed declining inflation pressures.
“The recent news about the long-run anchoring of inflation expectations in the United States is mostly reassuring: available measures of longer-run inflation expectations in the United States have remained remarkably stable,” Williams said in a chapter of a new Bank for International Settlements report.
Williams did not make any forward-looking comments about monetary policy in the report, but he did note what he sees as an encouraging trend of falling inflation and an ongoing commitment by the central bank to hitting its 2% target.
Williams also wrote that a rise in uncertainty over the future of inflation does not mean that the public expects higher price pressures.
This rise in uncertainty “does not appear to be due to unmoored longer-run expectations, given that the measures do not suggest that uncertainty is increasing linearly with the forecast horizon,” Williams wrote. “On the contrary, for many measures, uncertainty about longer-run inflation has increased by about the same degree or less than shorter-horizon measures,” he said.