Kaplan, Harker and Bostic hint crisis has reached later stages

Yahoo Finance's Brian Cheung joined Yahoo Finance Live to break down how the Fed's Kaplan, Harker and Bostic have hinted that they may change Fed policy sooner rather than later.

Video transcript

ADAM SHAPIRO: Jared, some of the hurdles that the session, the markets have had to jump today had to do with comments from different presidents within the Federal Reserve banking system. Brian Cheung is joining us now to bring us up to speed. It sounds as if they're hinting perhaps a little bit earlier than later when it comes to changing policy.

BRIAN CHEUNG: Yeah, well, we heard from at least four Fed officials today, again, part of the ongoing parade of speakers since we got those Federal Reserve minutes earlier in the week, showing that some or a couple of, at least, participants on the Federal Open Market Committee were seeing the case for maybe rapid progress that could cause them to maybe begin to have those discussions about tapering their aggressive asset purchase program. Keep in mind, they've been buying about $120 billion in assets a month. That's a big reason why the balance sheet is almost at $8 trillion. It's about 7.9 right now.

But the headlines Philadelphia Fed president Patrick Harker, who said taper talk should be, quote, "sooner rather than later." We also heard from Dallas Fed president Robert Kaplan, who said, rather gently, take the foot off the accelerator than brake later, hinting at his approach, which is maybe we should have these conversations, again, sooner rather than later. And then we also heard from Atlanta Fed president Raphael Bostic, who said he was worried about inflation getting entrenched. He said, though, however, right now, the dashboard of inflation, quote, "is not flashing red" or suggesting things are getting out of control. So we need to take the full context there.

And then, lastly, we also heard from Richmond Fed president Tom Barkin, who is saying that we are closer to substantial further progress on the economic recovery than the economy was back in January. And those three words "substantial further progress," obviously, very key in terms of the Federal Reserve. That's what they have in their official statement with regards to how they want to handle the balance sheet policy.

But worth mentioning that we will have some more updates on the Fed speech right here on Yahoo Finance. We'll have St. Louis Fed president James Bullard on our program on Monday at 12:30. So we'll get a bit of an update from that right here on this platform next week, guys.

ADAM SHAPIRO: Brian, we're going to keep talking about the impact not only about this Fed speak, but also crypto on the market--