WASHINGTON: A "very tight" job market and unabated inflation might require the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates sooner than expected and begin reducing its overall asset holdings as a second brake on the economy, U.S. central bank policymakers said in their meeting last month.
In a document released on Wednesday that markets took as decidedly hawkish, the minutes from the Dec. 14-15 policy meeting showed Fed officials uniformly concerned about the pace of price increases that promised to persist, alongside global supply bottlenecks "well into" 2022.
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