New York Federal Reserve President John Williams said Tuesday he expects the U.S. economy to avoid recession even as he sees the need for significantly higher interest rates to control inflation.
“A recession is not my base case right now,” Williams told CNBC’s Steve Liesman during a live “Squawk Box” interview. “I think the economy is strong. Clearly financial conditions have tightened and I’m expecting growth to slow this year quite a bit relative to what we had last year.”
Quantifying that, he said he could see gross domestic product gains reduced to about 1% to 1.5% for the year, a far cry from the 5.7% in 2021 that was the fastest pace since 1984.
“But that’s not a recession,” Williams noted. “It’s a slowdown that we need to see in the economy to really reduce the inflationary pressures that we have and bring inflation down.”
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