Fed's Evans sees "a lot of reason" for more easing – Reuters

Fed's Evans sees "a lot of reason" for more easing – Reuters


The U.S. Federal Reserve should take action to bring down unemployment, including by buying more bonds, a top Federal Reserve official known for his dovish policy views said on Thursday.
"There's a lot of reason to do more," Chicago Fed President Charles Evans told CNBC in Hong Kong, citing a jobless rate of 8.3 percent and growth in the United States that he expects to be just 2 percent or 2.5 percent, "if we are lucky," over the next year and a half.
The Fed has kept interest rates near zero since December 2008, and its current view, reiterated at its policy-setting meeting earlier this month, is that it will need to keep rates low until at least late 2014.
"I would like to provide more conditionality and explicit economic markers on what that means, because at the moment it sounds like, 'we kind of expect things aren't going to be very good,'" he said.