A top Federal Reserve official downplayed the disappointing jobs report for April in comments published Friday afternoon, suggesting that the numbers won’t affect his own plans for monetary policy.
“I wouldn’t put a lot of weight on it in terms of how it would affect my economic outlook,” Federal Reserve Bank of New York president William Dudley said, in a report from the New York Times.
Dudley is the vice chairman of the Fed’s monetary policy committee, which is next slated to meet to determine monetary policy in June.
Investors reacted to Friday’s jobs report by betting heavily that the Fed would not raise interest rates in June, and that it would only raise rates once through 2017.
Dudley, however, said that it was “reasonable” to expect the Fed to raise rates twice this year.
Markets and Fed officials have been at odds in their views of how the economy might grow and how the Fed might raise rates in response, with investors being significantly more pessimistic.
Bond markets, however, are forced to guess at how Fed members might react to any given economic indicator, given that Fed officials have said that they will change monetary policy based on incoming economic data. April’s jobs report is one of the biggest items of economic news that will be published before June.
