(Reuters) – Federal Reserve Governor Michelle Bowman, one of the U.S. central bank’s most hawkish policymakers, on Friday signaled she may pay increasing attention to signals from the job market as she weighs policy decisions ahead.
Bowman was responding to research presented at a conference examining how the rate-setting Federal Open Market Committee’s monetary policy influences economic activity. She did not mention the release on Friday of data showing the U.S. unemployment rate ticked up last month. That report spurred traders to continue to bet on several Fed interest rate cuts this year.
“Although the FOMC has been focused on lowering inflation in the past few years, as we continue to make progress on approaching our 2% target, I expect that the labor market and economic activity will become a larger factor in the FOMC’s policy discussions,” Bowman said in remarks prepared for delivery at a monetary policy forum organized by the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business in New York City.
Bowman did not otherwise speak to the economic or monetary policy outlook in her prepared remarks on the paper, which dealt with policy “shocks” and not the Fed’s systemic and well-telegraphed policy tightening used to combat the pandemic-era surge of inflation.
The Fed governor has in several of her recent speeches raised questions about leaning too heavily on job market data, given its frequent and large revisions, and has flagged continued worries about inflation. Bowman has also said she wants to wait for more clarity on the Trump administration’s policies and their economic effects.
(Reporting by Ann Saphir; Editing by Paul Simao)
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