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Cleveland Federal Reserve President and CEO Loretta Mester gives her keynote address at the 2014 Financial Stability Conference in Washington December 5, 2014. Gary Cameron | Reuters Cleveland Federal Reserve President Loretta Mester said Friday that interest rates likely need to keep moving higher to get inflation back to acceptable levels. In a CNBC interview, Mester said she sees the central bank's benchmark interest rate having to rise above 5% and stay there for a while. The fed funds rate, which sets the level that banks charge each other for overnight borrowing but spills over into many forms of consumer debt, is currently in a target range of 4.5%-4.75%. "I see that we're going to have to bring interest rates above 5%," she told CNBC's Steve Liesman during a "Squawk Box" interview. "We'll figure out how much above. That's going to depend on how the economy evolves over time. But I do think we have to be somewhat above 5% and hol...

A passageway near the Bank of England (BOE) in the City of London, U.K., on Thursday, March 18, 2021. Hollie Adams | Bloomberg | Getty Images LONDON — The Bank of England on Thursday hiked interest rates by 50 basis points and dialed back some of its previous bleak economic forecasts. The Monetary Policy Committee voted 7-2 in favor of a second consecutive half-point rate hike, taking the main Bank rate to 4%, but indicated in its decision statement that smaller hikes of 25 basis points may be in the cards in coming meetings. The two dissenting members voted to leave rates unchanged. Crucially, the Bank also dropped the word "forcefully" from its rhetoric around continuing to raise rates as necessary to rein in inflation. "Annual CPI inflation is expected to fall to around 4% towards the end of this year, alongside a much shallower projected decline in output than in the November Report forecast," the Bank said. U.K. inflation came in at 10.7% in December, down sl...

Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan said Friday that the bank is preparing for a potential recession in 2023, including a scenario where unemployment rises rapidly. “Our baseline scenario contemplates a mild recession . ... But we also add to that a downside scenario, and what this results in is 95% of our reserve methodology is weighted toward a recession ary environment in 2023,” Moynihan said on a call with investors. That pessimistic case, which is more negative than it was last quarter, calls for unemployment to rise to 5.5% early this year and remain at 5% or above through the end of 2024, Moynihan said. The CEO’s statement mirrors the earnings report for JPMorgan Chase, whose economic outlook calls for “a mild recession in the central case.” Bank of America beat estimates on the top and bottom lines for its fourth quarter, but its $1.1 billion provision for credit losses was a sharp reversal from a negative number in that metric a year ago. While the bank said net credit charg...