Fed’s Williams: Expect Growth of 3% in 2015

The U.S. economy has “good momentum,” San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank President John Williams told CNBC on Friday.

Williams predicted that the U.S. will see real GDP growth around 3 percent in 2015, and that the unemployment rate will touch 5 percent by the end of the year. Still, the central banker said he did not see the Fed hitting its inflation target until the end of 2016.

“I see us getting to full employment basically by the end of this year or before then, and in fact having a pretty strong labor market,” Williams said, explaining that he assesses normal levels of employment to be about 5.2 percent.  Consequently, he predicted that wage growth and inflation would both edge higher “once we get past this period of low inflation.”

CNBC