When Neel Kashkari first joined the Federal Reserve eight years ago, he quickly gained a reputation of being a frequent dissenter who often opposed raising rates.
These days, the president of the Minneapolis Fed has found himself in the opposite position: mostly agreeing with the rest of the rate-setting committee.
He fully participates in every meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee, but only has a vote on it every few years. Last year when he was a voting member, Kashkari didn’t object once to hiking rates or holding them steady as part of the Fed’s war on inflation. More recently, he’s also seen eye-to-eye with other policymakers on being patient and waiting awhile longer before they start cutting rates.
“I’m not shy about expressing my view,” he said in an interview.
But it takes a lot of confidence on what’s going on in the economy to say your view is right and the rest of the committee is wrong, he said.
“And right now, we’re getting so many mixed signals,” he said. “And things are reacting differently than we had expected. It’s hard to have that type of confidence or conviction.”
Never one to completely go along with the crowd, Kashkari has set himself apart in other ways. For example, he has suggested the Fed keep interest rates high for longer over time than most others on the committee. That makes him a “hawk” in Fed speak, a reversal from pre-pandemic days when he was a “dove” who wanted to keep rates low.
Regardless, Fed officials, including Kashkari, are hopeful as inflation has been coming back down after soaring to more than 9% at one point in 2022. Since then, the consumer price index has cooled off considerably to 3.1%, inching closer to the Fed’s 2% target.