Cleveland Fed President Loretta Mester said she expected unemployment rate to fall to 4.5% or lower this year, with GDP growth in 6-7% range. She emphasized, “my positive baseline outlook depends on appropriate monetary policy, which, in my view, will need to be very accommodative for some time to support the broadening of the recovery.”

“I wouldn’t consider the increase in inflation I expect this year to be the type of sustainable increase needed to meet the forward guidance on our policy rate,” she said. “So I expect to be deliberately patient unless there is clear evidence that inflation pressures will push inflation to exceed our desired path.”

“I need to see more improvement before I would consider the conditions of our forward guidance on asset purchases as being met,” said Mester.

Boston Fed President Eric Rosengren said on Wednesday that “significant slack remains in the economy”. “Substantial improvement” is needed to Fed to begin tapering. “It is quite possible that we’ll see those conditions as we get to the latter half of the year,” he said.

“But right now what we have is one really strong employment report, one quarterly strong GDP report,” Rosengren added. “And so I think it’s premature right now to focus on the tapering.” He emphasized, “the Fed has no desire to surprise markets.”

Separately, Vice Chair Richard Clarida told CNBC, “we’re still a long way from our goals, and in our new framework, we want to see actual progress and not just forecast progress.” Asked about when the Fed should start talking about tapering, he said, “we don’t think so right now.”

Chicago Fed President Charles Evans said, “our employment mandate is within sight”, but “achieving our inflation goal may prove more difficult.” He added that “policy is likely on hold for some time.”

Evans added that pre-pandemic economy with unemployment rate at 3.5% couldn’t even generate 2% inflation. hence, risk of overheating is “remote”.

Additionally, “I would not be concerned about inflation moving persistently too high unless we saw some quite outsized movements in financial market pricing at the longer maturities or in survey-based measures of inflation expectations,” he said.

Dallas Fed President Robert Kaplan “a lot has changed since December” in the US, with strong fiscal stimulus, fast vaccinations and eased restrictions. Hence, “it will make sense to at least start discussing how we would go about adjusting these purchases and start having those discussions sooner rather than later.”

On the other hand, San Francisco Fed President Mary Daly said the right time to start tapering is “when we are much closer to achieving our dual mandate goals than we are now… We have an optimistic outlook, a long way to go, and we are not out of the woods yet… we have only had a couple of months of really good data.”

Minneapolis Fed President Neel Kashkari said Fed should “not cut off the recovery prematurely.” “Today, roughly eight million Americans are out of work who were working before the pandemic. I assume that those folks want to work again,” he said. “How long is it going to take to bring all of those folks back into the labor market and really achieve full employment? We’ll see. It may take a few years.”