Cleveland Fed President Loretta Mester said in a Washington Post interview yesterday, “I don’t believe we’re in a recession… We don’t have a slowdown in labor markets, and that’s two key factors that go into calling a recession.”

“Our policy has been to raise interest rates in order to cool down the demand side of the economy…. but certainly it hasn’t slowed enough, (a), to call it a recession; and (b), to even see that moderation in demand showing through yet to a moderation and a cooling-off of price increases and inflation,” she added.

“We have more work to do because we have not seen that turn in inflation. It’s got to be a sustained several months of evidence that inflation has first peaked – we haven’t even seen that yet – and that it’s moving down,” she also noted.

Full interview here.

San Francisco Fed President Mary Daly said Fed is “nowhere near almost done”, with inflation. “We have made a good start and I feel really pleased with where we’ve gotten to at this point.”

“It really would be premature to unwind all of that and say the job is done,” she said. “I also think that we’ve been with this high inflation for a while, and really getting too confident that we’ve already solved the problem,” Daly said, adding that the Fed needs to “keep committed until we actually see it in the data.”

Chicago Fed President Charles Evan said that is things “weren’t improving”, the 50bps rate hike in September is a “reasonable assessment”, but 75 bps “could also be ok”. He added “I doubt that more would be called for.”

“We wanted to get to neutral expeditiously. We want to get a little restrictive expeditiously,” Evans added. “We want to see if the real side effects are going to start coming back in line … or if we have a lot more ahead of us.”

Minneapolis Fed President Neel Kashkari said in a CBS interview on Sunday, “we are a long way away from achieving an economy that is back at 2% inflation, and that’s where we need to get to.”

“Whether we are technically in a recession or not doesn’t change my analysis,” he added. “I’m focused on the inflation data. I’m focused on the wage data. And so far, inflation continues to surprise us to the upside. Wages continue to grow.”

“Typically, recessions demonstrate high job losses, high unemployment, those are terrible for American families. And we’re not seeing anything like that,” he said.

“Whether we are technically in a recession or not doesn’t change the fact that the Federal Reserve has its own work to do, and we are committed to doing it,” Kashkari said.