Based on the incoming data over the summer, my position was that we would soon achieve the substantial further progress needed to start tapering of asset purchases— in particular, our purchases of agency mortgage-backed securities—and that we needed to “go early and go fast” on tapering our asset purchases to position ourselves for rate hikes in 2022 should we need to tighten policy.
5 I also argued that, if the July and August job reports came in around the forecast values of 800,000 to 1 million job gains per month, we should commence tapering our asset purchases at the September 2021 FOMC See Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (2021), “Minutes of the Federal Open Market Committee, June 15–16, 2021,” press release, https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/pressreleases/monetary20210707a.htm.