12:12 PM EST, 12/02/2024 (MT Newswires) -- The US economy remains "on solid footing," but the Federal Open Market Committee needs to be prepared for the unexpected and possibly ease monetary policy faster, Atlanta Federal Reserve Bank President Raphael Bostic, a voter on the FOMC in 2024, said Monday in an essay posted to the Atlanta Fed's website.

Bostic said that the labor market is at or around maximum employment and the US is nearing price stability, but while the outlook is positive, it is not assured.

"The path ahead for monetary policy is not preset," Bostic wrote. "In making judgments about what this path should look like, my strategy will be to look to the incoming data, information from our portfolio of surveys, the balance of risks, and input from our business contacts. Much hard work lies before us. We stand ready."

On the labor market, Bostic said that some cooling has been seen recently and while there are no signs of significant deterioration, it requires vigilance.

"The salient question for me today is whether the labor market is cooling more dramatically than I had imagined when I developed my outlook for the economy," Bostic wrote. "The answer has important implications for monetary policy, because if conditions in the labor market are in fact worse than my committee colleagues and I thought a few months ago, then that probably bolsters the case for continuing to remove policy restrictiveness, and perhaps argues that we should do so more aggressively."

Bostic noted that the inflation data this year have been "bumpy" and that upside risks remain, but it is not clear that progress toward the Fed's 2% goal has been stunted.

"There are certainly upside risks to price stability," Bostic said. "Indeed, our Underlying Inflation Dashboard shows that many measures of inflation remain well above target. Still, weighing the totality of the data, I do not view the recent bumpiness as a sign that progress toward price stability has completely stalled."