Fed's Bullard: tight U.S. labor market may put upward pressure on inflation

[May 26, 2016]  SINGAPORE (Reuters) - U.S. labor markets are relatively tight and may put upward pressure on inflation, St. Louis Federal Reserve President James Bullard said on Thursday.

"By nearly any metric, U.S. labor markets are at or beyond full employment," Bullard said in an OMFIF lecture in Singapore.

"In short, labor markets are relatively tight," he said. "This may put upward pressure on inflation going forward."

Bullard noted that there was a divergence between the financial market's expectations for U.S. interest rate rises and the median projections among Fed policymakers.

"The FOMC has laid out, via the Summary of Economic Projections (SEP), a data-dependent 'slow normalization,' whereby the nominal policy rate would gradually rise over the next several years provided the economy evolves as expected," he said.

"Market-based forecasts of FOMC policy, in contrast, envision 'almost no normalization,' whereby the policy rate would be changed only a few times in the next several years," Bullard said.

(Reporting by Marius Zaharia and Masayuki Kitano; Editing by Kim Coghill)

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