The minutes of the December 2022 monetary policy meeting released by the Federal Reserve Board on the 4th showed that Fed officials reiterated their determination to reduce inflation and warned the market not to underestimate their willingness to maintain high interest rates for a period of time. The Federal Reserve held its last monetary policy meeting last year from December 13 to 14, 2022, and announced that it would increase the target range of the federal funds interest rate by 50 basis points to between 4.25% and 4.5%. According to the minutes of the meeting, in response to the optimism that the Federal Reserve is widely expected to end interest rate hikes or even cuts, Federal Reserve officials fear that this will increase the difficulty of the Federal Reserve in cooling the economy and undermine its efforts to curb inflation. As the price increase in the United States has slowed down in recent months, the proportion holding similar views is increasing. Federal Reserve officials pointed out that because monetary policy plays an important role in the financial environment, when there is "baseless easing" in the financial environment, especially when such easing is caused by public misunderstanding about how the Federal Reserve will respond to new data, the efforts of the Federal Reserve to restore price stability will face a more complex situation. Federal Reserve officials agreed that with the easing of supply chain bottlenecks, inflation in October and November fell back. But they also stressed that more evidence is needed to ensure that inflation is "continuing to decline". Therefore, the Federal Reserve is willing to take the risk of rising unemployment and slowing economic growth to pull the inflation rate back to the long-term target of 2%. A tracking data from the Chicago Mercantile Exchange shows that after the release of the meeting minutes, the market expects the possibility of the Federal Reserve raising interest rates by 25 basis points at the next meeting to be about 72%. Meanwhile, the federal funds rate will reach a peak of about 5% in June this year. The Federal Reserve will hold the first monetary policy meeting in 2023 from January 31 to February 1. (Liu Xinshe)