Minneapolis Fed President Neel Kashkari joins 'Squawk Box' to discuss the state of the economy, the Fed's inflation fight, interest rate outlook, his thoughts on how many meetings the Fed needs, and more.
What Neel Kashkari said
Written from the verified transcript and checked against it. Every figure links to the moment it was said.
Minneapolis Fed President Neel Kashkari defended his dissent in favor of a rate hike, arguing that with inflation high for five-plus years and successive supply shocks, monetary policy is not clearly restrictive. He said he appreciated Chairman Kevin Warsh's encouragement to vote his conscience and described the pre-meeting calls as discussions, not pressure. Kashkari declined to predict September's decision, citing upcoming data and Middle East news, but said three hikes by year-end are 'not impossible.' He rejected the idea that his goal is to slow the economy, attributing most inflation to supply shocks, and cited the 1970s Burns Fed as a cautionary tale. He favors gradual rate increases now to avoid aggressive action later, and supports continuing the Fed's practice of explaining its reaction function, while deferring on meeting frequency to a task force.
Key takeaways
Kashkari dissented in favor of a rate hike, seeing no evidence monetary policy is restrictive.
He said three rate hikes by end of 2026 are 'not impossible' if inflation persists.
He cited the 1970s Burns Fed as a warning against looking through supply shocks.
He supports continuing to explain the Fed's reaction function to the public.
1:36So tell me how it happens, because at least historically, the Fed chair has called around before a meeting and said, what are you going to do? What's your plan?
2:26Is your expectation that in September, given what you know about the other members and where we are, that we will have a rate hike?
Thanks, Becky. We are live at the annual Aspen Economic Strategy Group meeting. And with us is Minneapolis Fed President Neel Kashkari. He was one of the dissenters last week. Let's talk about rates, rate hikes, and your decision to dissent.
Well, thanks for having me, Andrew. It's great to be here. You know, inflation has been high now for five-plus years. Energy prices remain high. I think the outlook for the Strait of Hormuz is uncertain. I certainly don't trust the Iranians. And so at some point, you know, the Fed's job is to get inflation back down to our 2% target. Corporate earnings are through the roof. They're doing great. The consumer is hanging in there. The labor market is hanging in there. I look at this constellation and I say, what evidence do I have that monetary policy is particularly restrictive right now? And so I argued, now is the time to start slowly moving up as we get more data in.
There were some other dissenters with you. You've dissented before. I have, by the way—this was really though the first time with Kevin Warsh now in the seat. I'm curious just what your thought was about that because there was, there is a view or was a view that, you know, sometimes a new chair comes in, may have a particular view. Sometimes there might be like a honeymoon period. It doesn't seem like you were giving him the honeymoon period.
Well, you know, he said publicly many times that he likes a good family fight. He said that publicly. He said that internally. And I'll just say to me, he said to me, do what you think is the right thing to do for the economy. And I said, I really appreciate that.
So tell me how it happens, because at least historically, the Fed chair has called around before a meeting and said, what are you going to do? What's your plan? And I assume it's tried to either talk you into or out of wherever.
Not exactly how those calls go. So usually those calls go—and Kevin, and we appreciate it, Chairman Warsh has continued the tradition of reaching out to everybody in advance. We have a discussion about how I'm seeing the economy, how he's seeing the economy. We talk about where we might see things similarly or differently, and then I say, hey, here's where I'm likely coming out in terms of my policy recommendation. In this case, I was undecided. I wanted to go into the meeting and hear all the arguments on both sides. And I ultimately decided that raising rates was the right thing to do. I wasn't pounding the table that we needed to raise now, and if we waited until September, that would be too late. But my conclusion, based on everything I listened to, was that it's better to get going.
I'm not going to speculate on what the committee might do. We have a lot of data that we're going to get in. We got two more inflation prints between now and September. A lot of news potentially to come from the Middle East, data centers—I mean, everything else we're going to look at before we decide.
But just to go back on this a little bit, are you—I mean, we just talked to Brian Moynihan. His team thinks there could be three rate hikes by the end of the year. What is the Neel Kashkari view of the world?
Well, that's not impossible in my view. I mean, if inflation continues to move sideways or even get worse from here, then I think we're going to have to start gradually adjusting interest rates to bring things back down. This is the conundrum that we're facing is traditional economic analysis says if there's a one-time supply shock, monetary policy should just let that flow through the economy, don't necessarily react to it. But now we've had a series of successive supply shocks over four or five years. Inflation has been frustratingly persistent. It's our job to get inflation back down.
11 more exchanges in this transcript
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Kashkari, N. (2026, August 5). Minneapolis Fed President Kashkari: 'Now is the time to start slowly moving' rates up [Interview transcript]. CNBC Television. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1160149/
MLA
Neel Kashkari. "Minneapolis Fed President Kashkari: 'Now is the time to start slowly moving' rates up." CNBC Television, 5 Aug. 2026. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1160149/.
BibTeX
@misc{kashkari2026_1160149,
author = {Neel Kashkari},
title = {Minneapolis Fed President Kashkari: 'Now is the time to start slowly moving' rates up},
howpublished = {Interview transcript, CNBC Television. CEOInterviews.AI},
year = {2026},
month = {aug},
url = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1160149/},
note = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}
