By Jessica Coacci and Matt Grossman

Dallas Fed President Lorie Logan said she is increasingly concerned about how long it will take inflation to return to the Federal Reserve's 2% target, explaining her dissent against language in the latest policy statement that suggests the next adjustment would most likely be a cut.

"The conflict in the Middle East raises the prospect of prolonged or repeated supply disruptions that could create further inflationary pressures," she said Friday morning.

At Jerome Powell's final meeting as chair, three officials dissented against the central bank's policy statement because they thought it was too dovish. Logan, Beth Hammack of the Cleveland Fed and the Minneapolis Fed's Neel Kashkari all opposed retaining the "easing bias" language in the Fed's policy statement.

Fed governor Stephen Miran, an advocate of lower rates, dissented in favor of a quarter-point cut.

Even before the war began, Logan said she believed the Fed's interest-rate stance was well positioned for the risk facing the economy--signaling limited urgency to return to cutting rates.

She said Friday that forward guidance on the Fed's rate path, as in the recent policy statement, is a key part of how the central bank steers the economy.

"When the FOMC gives forward guidance about the likely course of future interest rates, as in the recent post-meeting statement, that guidance is an important policy tool," she said. That stance pushes back on an argument advanced by Kevin Warsh, the nominee to succeed Powell as Fed chair, who has suggested that the central bank sends too many signals about what it may do in the future.

Logan's statement also offers a counter to one of the key ways Warsh has laid groundwork to justify possible interest-rate cuts. In a confirmation hearing last week, he argued that the Fed should pay more attention to an alternative measure of inflation: trimmed-mean metrics, which exclude categories with the biggest price swings. Trimmed-mean inflation has been running cooler than traditional measures of price increases.

In her Friday statement, Logan argued that trimmed-mean metrics, too, were higher than tolerable even before the Middle East conflict began--especially because they are best interpreted as an indication of inflation's underlying trend.

"Even before recent increases in the prices of energy and other commodities, those measures had been running meaningfully above 2 percent, leaving doubts about how long it will take inflation to return to target," Logan said.

Write to Jessica Coacci at jessica.coacci@wsj.com and Matt Grossman at matt.grossman@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

May 01, 2026 11:29 ET (15:29 GMT)

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