Fed’s Dudley says economy too weak to taper

By Greg Robb and William L. Watts, MarketWatch

Reuters

Dennis Lockhart, who heads the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta and is shown at right with his Chicago Fed counterpart, Charles Evans, suggests there is evidence that the U.S. economy has lost steam.

NEW YORK (MarketWatch) — Two senior Federal Reserve officials Monday expressed disappointment with the pace of the U.S. recovery, with New York Fed President William Dudley saying the economy is too weak for the central bank to pull back its bond-buying program.

Dudley expects headwinds holding back the economy to abate in early 2014. But he noted that “this is just a forecast [and] has not been realized yet.”

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While the economy is slowly healing, there has been no pickup in its “forward momentum,” he said in a speech at Fordham University.

He blamed the sluggishness, in part, on a drag from fiscal policy, in the form of the expiration of the payroll tax holiday and higher tax rates in January, along with the budget sequester. The sharp rise in market interest rates since May, when investors began looking toward a potential cutback in Fed bond buys, is also holding back the economy, he said.

“The economy still needs the support of a very accommodative monetary policy,” Dudley, who always has a vote on the Fed policy-making committee, said.

A key ally of Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, Dudley said he would like to see “economic news that makes me more confident that we will see continued improvement in the labor market” before he would vote to reduce the pace of the central bank’s asset-purchase program.

In a separate speech, Atlanta Fed President Dennis Lockhart said the economy may have lost dynamism.

“Is America losing its economic mojo?” Lockhart said in a speech in New York to a summit on creative leadership sponsored by the Louise Blouin Foundation. “There is some evidence to the affirmative.”

The U.S. central bank surprised many economists and investors last week by holding its monthly bond-buying program steady at $85 billion. Many had expected a $10 billion reduction, or tapering.

The comments by Dudley and Lockhart suggested that Fed officials were less content with the pace of the recovery and improvement in the labor market than previously thought. While some commentators contend that the Fed’s refusal to slow its bond buys in September raised questions about the central bank’s communications policy, Dudley said the decision was in keeping with guidance laid out by Bernanke in June.

Stocks were mostly lower in the wake of the speeches. The Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA -0.32%  recovered some of its early losses but was still down 42 points to 15,408. Treasury prices 10_YEAR -0.48% inched higher, sending yields lower. 

In an interview later with The Wall Street Journal, Lockhart said he doubted that the Fed would taper in October.

“In the short time between now and the October meeting, I don’t think there will be an accumulation of enough evidence to dramatically change the picture” about where the economy now stands,” Lockhart said.

The Atlanta Fed president is not a voting member of the Fed’s policy-making committee, but his views often align with the consensus opinion.

Dudley said that there was a “hollowing out” of middle-income jobs that are particularly vulnerable to technology and automation. He said that rising income inequality was “definitely a problem.”

In his remarks, Lockhart said statistics show that fewer businesses are expanding their workforces and workers aren't leaving jobs for better opportunities, Lockhart said.

Startups are finding it hard to get capital in the wake of the financial crisis and worker output per hour worked — known as productivity — has slowed to a crawl, at least temporarily, he noted.

“There are reasons to believe that some of the decline is cyclical in nature and will reverse over time,” Lockhart said, but business leaders and government officials need to be proactive, he said.

One Fed officials who was a strong supporter of a September taper spoke later Monday. Dallas Fed President Richard Fisher told the Independent Bankers Association of Texas annual convention in San Antonio that a failure to step back the pace of purchases would “increase uncertainty about the future conduct of policy and call the credibility of our communications into question.” “I believe that it is exactly what has occurred, though I take no pleasure in saying so,” he added.

Greg Robb is a senior reporter for MarketWatch in Washington. Follow him on Twitter @grobb2000. William L. Watts is MarketWatch's senior markets writer, based in New York. Follow him on Twitter @wlwatts.

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