"Federal Reserve's megaphone": Bessen's policy reaction function has shifted to be less dovish

On August 5th, Jin10 Data reported that "Fed mouthpiece" Nick Timiraos stated that U.S. Treasury Secretary Becerra's policy response function has shifted to be less dovish. His comments this year suggest that the Federal Reserve should continue to maintain interest rates unchanged. Earlier this year, Becerra cited models indicating that the level of Federal Reserve interest rates could be more than 25 basis points to over 100 basis points above the neutral rate. Today (August 4th), he presented two viewpoints. First, he defended Walsh's decision last week not to elaborate on any policy response function: "I believe every meeting should be open, and market participants should make their own judgments... I think Walsh wants to keep options open to achieve the best outcomes." Secondly, he did propose a set of policy response functions that could be seen as dovish and argued that recent shocks should be ignored: "What impact will the rise in short-term interest rates actually have? We will wait and see." He raised this question but then responded by pointing out that underlying inflation is "very mild... very stable." "In core inflation, after excluding the more volatile items affected by energy, the rest has remained very stable. I believe this situation will continue