This seemingly throwaway line at the end of the discussion is going to be a big story over the next few years. The question is whether or not, once Fed officials raise interest rates to a level they deem to be "neutral" for the economy, they will decide to continue raising rates to levels that would be explicitly designed to slow economic activity and raise the unemployment rate.
Fed officials don't seem ready to declare victory on inflation just yet.
The minutes echo some of the recent Fedspeak about market turbulence on the point that despite higher volatility, there aren't any whispers of businesses having a harder time accessing financing as a result.
Jay Powell is likely one of these participants. He just spoke on Friday about how it "almost has to be true."
The anecdotes continue to suggest employers still have plenty of margins of adjustment to exhaust before they're actually forced to raise wages faster, and in a more broad-based fashion.
The minutes make clear that "several" FOMC participants are now turning their eyes toward explicitly restrictive policy in the next few years in order to intentionally slow down the economy.
A very notable development in March: for the first time since the FOMC started publishing data on the balance of risks to their inflation forecasts in 2011, none of them see that balance as tilted to the downside.
The bottom line from this meeting seems to be that the Phillips curve way of seeing the world is very much intact at the Fed. The staff presentation on inflation forecasting couldn't come up with any better options, and it's clear that the increased optimism among policy makers is due to a very basic output gap framework.
Fed staff presented their quarterly report on financial stability, and it looks like they didn't see any increase in risks on that front from the previous presentation.
It is a bit striking how little the inflation conversation has changed in recent years. We've been reading the same thing every six weeks. The two sides of the debate seem to remain firmly in place: some see tighter labor markets lifting prices, and others are still skeptical.
The staff presentation on the economic outlook helps explain why policy makers have become more optimistic due to the tax cuts.
There was a big staff presentation on inflation forecasting in January, and it looks like the upshot was that the old models are still more or less intact, despite the unexpected shortfall in inflation over the last year or two.
It looks like the staff economists at the Board of Governors who present at each FOMC meeting pushed back their forecast for when inflation would rise to the 2 percent target in December, to 2020. In November they said it would get there by 2019, according to the minutes of that meeting.
It looks like a few people on the FOMC think easy financial conditions have *already* translated into more consumer spending.
The supplement to the projections released after the December meeting shows fewer FOMC participants are worried about downside risks to their inflation projections than they were in September.