WASHINGTON -- Members of the Federal Open Market Committee voted 11 to 1 to adopt a wait-and-see position on short-term interest rates when they met Sept. 27, according to minutes of the meeting released on Friday.
The dissent came from J. Alfred Broaddus, president of the Richmond Federal Reserve Bank, who favored moving right away to adopt a tighter stance on credit.,
The FOMC subsequently raised short-term rates to 5.50% from 4.75% last week, but the record of that meeting will not become available until late December.
At the September meeting, officials said the outlook for inflation next year "had picked up recently" given the continued strength in the economy. But they also said that so far wage and price pressures remained muted due to business gains in productivity and other factors.
The officials said the economy had proven to be unexpectedly resilient to the Fed's policy of tightening credit that began in February. They went on to say it was "extremely difficult" to tell whether the earlier rate increases would have an impact with a greater delay than usual or if members had misjudged the underlying strength of the expansion.
Broaddus argued that Fed policy was too accommodative and should be tightened immediately given signs of increasing price pressures ......
-- Stephen A. Davies
