WHEN: Today, Thursday, November 19, 2015
WHERE: CNBC's "Squawk Box"
Following are excerpts from the unofficial transcript of a CNBC EXCLUSIVE interview with Cleveland Federal Reserve President Loretta Mester on CNBC's "Squawk Box" today. Following is a link to a video clip of the interview on CNBC.com: http://video.cnbc.com/gallery/?video=3000453897.
All references must be sourced to CNBC.
MESTER ON INFLATION
You saw oil prices temper, the changes in oil prices temper and you saw the changes in the value of the dollar temper. You've got inflation measures those underlying inflation measures moving back up and that's the dynamic so again that's one of the pieces that gives me more confidence in the inflation forecast.
MESTER ON BEING TRANSPARENT
We're trying to be transparent about where the thinking of the committee is. The committee basically said 'look, our forecast is that we expect labor markets to continue to improve. Growth will be sufficient to get further improvement in labor markets' and our forecast is that inflation will gradually move back up to our targeted 2%. And we wanted to make sure that people understood that we're going to looking at all the data and all our business contact information that we get between that meeting and the December meeting and then we are going to make a judgement at that meeting but this was our view that things were on track.
MESTER ON THE PATH
There's a lot of considerations that go into setting up appropriate policy. My own view is that we have to look at both sides so I can see that eventually we could get behind if we don't take off. I think the path after liftoff is more important than the liftoff per say. There's a lot of reasons to think that's going to be a gradual path and the FMOC has said that in the statement and I agree with that.
MESTER ON THE ATTACKS
When you think about the economics of those kinds of attacks that we've had in the past usually you see a sharp change in markets, but typically that doesn't be sustained and again that's what we saw in the markets here so that's one of the things that can happen. Then the other thing you worry about in terms of the median run outlook which is the relative time horizon for monetary policy is will it cause so much uncertainty that people will pull back, lower activity how will it affect the outlook. Right now, my assessment is it's not going to change the outlook that much from my point of view in terms of growth for the US economy.
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