CLEVELAND -- Jack Schron spent most of 90 minutes last week showing Cleveland Fed President Beth Hammack how good business has gotten at Jergens, a family-run manufacturer built on the site of old railroad buildings on the city's east side.

Orders from aerospace companies are surging, tariffs have made a Chinese rival's parts more expensive, and the company is about to make the biggest machine-tool purchase in its 84-year history.

Jergens makes industrial hardware such as clamps and quick-release pins that lock everything from aircraft panels to concert speakers into position. What matters most to his customers has shifted, Schron told the central banker. Quality is still the minimum for getting in the door at the aerospace giants. "The next threshold used to be price," he said.

Now it is speed. "No one wants to wait on anything anymore," said Schron, the company's president. Buyers will pay a premium to get products in weeks instead of months, and that has helped Jergens' bottom line.

That kind of pricing power worries inflation fighters like Hammack. It suggests demand is outrunning what suppliers can make, a dynamic that higher interest rates are supposed to tamp down. Yet interest rates never came up during her visit, which ended with a tour of the busy factory floor.

Jergens is one company, but its experience fits what Hammack said she is hearing from across her district. "You heard it from Jack. He's buying expensive machinery. He's investing. He sees a lot of demand. The growth is there," Hammack said in an interview after the tour.

It is a big reason she thinks the Fed, which raised its benchmark rate last month to a range of 3.75% to 4%, needs to go higher still. With inflation above the Fed's 2% target for more than five years, Hammack says she hears from lower-income households that are no longer just trading down at the grocery store but choosing which bills to pay. Most of her colleagues last month saw inflation returning to target in 2029. "To me, that's far too long," she said.

Hammack, who spent more than 30 years at Goldman Sachs before joining the Fed in 2024, has been among the most outspoken officials in pushing for higher rates, and she isn't shy about laying out her views. "I grew up in a world as a trader where if I was wrong 49% of the time, that was a pretty good day, so I'm not afraid of putting out a forecast," she said.

Hammack said she sees a forecast as a yardstick and not a prediction: a way to measure her expectations against reality and adjust as the two diverge. She was early to argue that rates might not be restraining the economy as much as Fed officials thought, and the boom in AI-related spending rippling through the industrial and technology sectors has since brought more of her colleagues around to that view.

The question now is how quickly to adjust. Minutes of the Fed's September meeting showed most officials thought another increase would likely be appropriate by year-end, and several have signaled they think the Fed doesn't need to raise rates again this month.

Hammack didn't sound as patient. "Smaller, more frequent adjustments are preferable to larger" ones, in part because making bigger moves can be harder for businesses to prepare for, said Hammack. In July, when the Fed held rates steady, she was one of three policymakers who dissented in favor of a rate increase.

Officials often gauge how much they are restraining the economy against some estimate of an unobservable "neutral" rate, the level that neither spurs nor slows growth. Hammack said her estimate is among the highest on the committee, and that if she is wrong, it is too low.

"When you see the amount of capital that's flowing in, when you see the profits that are being created, to me, this does not look like an economy that has restraint," she said.

Long-term Treasury yields have been on the march since the summer, raising borrowing costs across the economy. Hammack said that has moved financial conditions closer to neutral, but she rejected the suggestion that the bond market could do the Fed's work for it. "Absolutely not," she said. "It's not a substitute, it's a complement."

Outside the Fed, critics argue that higher rates are the wrong tool for the job. They can't produce more oil and may not immediately slow AI spending financed by tech giants' cash and the bond market. Hammack conceded the point. "I do not think that raising rates is going to materially slow the data-center demand," she said.

Higher rates can change who gets the parts. Data-center builders compete with the aircraft makers, energy producers and transportation companies for many of the same components. Buyers of anything tied to data centers show "much less price sensitivity and much greater sense of urgency around delivery," Hammack said. Instead of haggling, they will keep paying up.

But higher rates might make one of the other buyers "think twice" about a new facility or product. That would cool demand and ease price pressures at the margin, she said.

Hammack's willingness to say where she stands sets her apart from Fed Chairman Kevin Warsh, who was a year ahead of her at Stanford University. Warsh has said he wants to move the Fed away from signaling its own moves or narrating its forecasts, which he has argued locks officials into defending a projection instead of responding to the economy as it unfolds.

Saying less just leaves businesses and households to guess, she said. Her job is to "arm the public with as much information as possible" and to "treat them like mature grown-ups."

Listening is the other half of the job. Conversations with business owners can help signal shifts before they are evident in the data.

Labor costs, the biggest line item for many businesses, are going up at a slower pace than a year ago. But Hammack said she hears more about how hard it is to find workers.

At Jergens, which employs roughly 450 people, that shortage finds its way into costs. The pool of applicants for every opening has shrunk, said Matt Schron, Jack's son and the company's general manager. New hires now come in above what current employees earn, which drives pay raises for workers already on the payroll.

"So it re-prices the entire workforce," Hammack said, connecting the dots.

Tariffs cut both ways, too. They have made a Chinese competitor's parts pricier, but they also raise the cost of the high-precision machine tools the company has to import from Japan, Germany or South Korea because U.S. makers don't build them. The tariff on one machine Jergens is buying tops $200,000.

The cost of that tariff, Jack Schron said, has "ultimately got to be in the price of the product" that he will sell to his customers.