Lockhart spoke at an event in Orlando on Monday morning and appears to have made the comparison during a Q&A following his remarks.
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“I think October is a live meeting, clearly there is the potential that the data coming in, in advance of the October meeting will be sufficient … we have a lot more in December”, he said following a speech to a university association in Orlando, Florida.
The O.J. Simpson murder trial went on for about eight months.
Bloomberg said that China’s consumer inflation moderated and factory gate deflation extended a record stretch of declines, signaling the People’s Bank of China still has room to ease monetary policy to support a slowing economy.
Gold, which as a non-yielding asset tends to benefit from ultra-low rates, has rallied more than 5 percent since a weak U.S. jobs report on October. 2 fuelled speculation the Fed would postpone its first rate hike in almost a decade until 2016.
The Fed had refrained from hiking rates at its September meeting citing concerns about the global economy, though Fed Chair Janet Yellen had said later that the central bank was on track to raise rates this year.
She’s not alone. Presidents of the St. Louis Fed and Richmond Fed, James Bullard and Jeffrey Lacker, also said this week they want rates to be higher.
Tarullo, who is the Fed’s point person for financial regulation, said policymakers should “really look for a few tangible evidence of, for example, pickups in wages or inflation that allow us to make informed decisions based on the evidence”. “It is appropriate for monetary policy to take a step back from the emergency measure of zero interest rates”.
The key for the Fed is that when it begins to raise rates, it needs to be confident it can move forward with that effort, he said.
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Lockhart told his audience of university economists that China’s slowdown shouldn’t directly have much of an impact on US growth, though its effect on other countries’ growth could lead to a larger impact on the domestic economy. According to a report released by the Federal Reserve, consumer prices have increased by just 0.3 percent in August from a year earlier and continues to remain stubbornly below the 2 percent target that the Federal Reserve has. “A variety of econometric estimates would suggest that the classic Phillips Curve influence of resource utilization on inflation is, at best, very weak at the moment”.
