The Federal Reserve should ditch all references to dates in its policy statement and instead base decisions on economic data, particularly inflation, a top Fed policymaker said on Friday.
Charles Plosser, who will step down as head of the Philadelphia Fed on March 1, also called on the central bank to submit policy reports to lawmakers more regularly. And he repeated that Congress should cut unemployment from the Fed's official mandate, so that it could focus solely on inflation.
The Fed's recent policy statements "have increasingly given the impression that it wants to achieve an employment goal as quickly as possible through aggressive monetary accommodation," Plosser told a conference of the Society of American Business Editors and Writers.
The speech by Plosser, a hawkish official who dissented against the last two Fed policy decisions, cut to the internal debate at the central bank over how to refine the language it uses to telegraph when interest rates will finally rise.
As it stands, the Fed says it will wait a "considerable time" after this month to tighten, saying in the statement there is yet a "significant" amount of wasted labor resources.
"Monetary policy should be data dependent, not date dependent," Plosser said, again pushing the idea of a less discretionary and more systematic approach to policymaking.
The Fed currently submits comprehensive policy reports to Congress, and Chair Janet Yellen addresses lawmakers, twice a year. Plosser, who announced his retirement last month, suggested quarterly reports would be better.
© 2017 Reuters All rights reserved.
