Atlanta Federal Reserve President Raphael Bostic on Thursday said it was too soon to be scaling back asset purchases or having the Fed’s interest-rate committee formally discuss the issue at their next meeting in mid-June. In recent days, Dallas Fed President Rob Kaplan has called for a formal discussion of tapering of the Fed’s $120 billion of asset purchases, but many other Fed officials have said such a conversation would be premature. “There is a lot of healing that would need to happen before I would want to start to be thinking about us having made substantial progress,” which is the benchmark the Fed set for tapering, Bostic said, in comments to reporters after a speech at a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau conference. Bostic said each of the 18 top Fed officials are still making up their own minds about when to taper. “Right now, I’m not sure I am at a place where I would be wanting to force that conversation at a committee level,” he said.
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