Philadelphia Federal Reserve President Patrick Harker on Thursday contended that more interest rate hikes would be needed to tame inflationary pressures that have continued to hover around forty-year highs, CNBC reported.

“We are going to keep raising rates for a while,” he said in remarks for a speech in New Jersey. “Given our frankly disappointing lack of progress on curtailing inflation, I expect we will be well above 4 percent by the end of the year,” he continued.

Last month, the Federal Reserve approved a third consecutive seventy-five-basis-point interest rate hike and suggested that it will keep raising rates well above the current level. With the move, the central bank took its federal funds rate up to the 3 percent to 3.25 percent range, the highest level since the global financial crisis in 2008.

According to CNBC, markets are widely expecting the Fed to sign off on a fourth-straight seventy-five-basis-point hike early next month, followed by another in December. “Sometime next year, we are going to stop hiking rates. At that point, I think we should hold at a restrictive rate for a while to let monetary policy do its work,” Harker said. “It will take a while for the higher cost of capital to work its way through the economy. After that, if we have to, we can tighten further, based on the data,” he added.

Amid the double whammy of rising rates and high inflation, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos became the latest corporate leader to warn about the state of the U.S. economy on Tuesday. “Yep, the probabilities in this economy tell you batten down the hatches,” Bezos wrote on Twitter while sharing a video of Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon telling business owners to be cautious and “expect that there’s more volatility on the horizon.”

Meanwhile, Tesla CEO Elon Musk believes that a global economic downturn could last for another year and a half. In a Twitter exchange on Friday, Musk claimed that a recession could continue “until spring of ’24.”

The latest recession probability models released by Bloomberg economists signal that a U.S. recession is effectively certain within the next twelve months. The alarming projection comes on the heels of the Wall Street Journal’s latest survey of sixty-six economists, who say that the odds of a recession within the next twelve months is 63 percent. It was the first time the survey pegged the probability above 50 percent since July 2020.

Ethen Kim Lieser is a Washington state-based Finance and Tech Editor who has held posts at Google, The Korea Herald, Lincoln Journal Star, AsianWeek, and Arirang TV. Follow or contact him on LinkedIn.

Image: Reuters.