Sherry Cooper Per Quotations

My take is that the Fed will continue to raise overnight rates until it feels it has moved from a stimulative to a neutral policy stance. That will likely take the funds rate to 4 per cent-to-4.25 per cent by yearend.

Despite slowing job growth momentum, the Fed is going to pay attention to the diminishing slack (the 5 per cent unemployment rate could be as low as 4.8 per cent if not for the hurricanes) and the pickup in wage pressures,

I'm not worried about inflation per se ; I'm worried about inflation in asset prices. When the Fed has been aggressively easy in the past, it's ended up having to come in and aggressively raise interest rates and cause a lot of unnecessary dislocation.

The great post-Katrina inflation scare has vanished, with gasoline prices coming back down to Earth and core inflation on track to match the Bank of Canada's latest estimate of 1.6 per cent for Q4.