Dec 22 (Reuters) - U.S. Federal Reserve Governor Stephen Miran said on Monday he is likely to remain on the central bank's Board of Governors beyond the expiration of his term until whoever President Donald Trump nominates as the next Fed chair is confirmed by the Senate.
"If nobody is confirmed in my seat by January 31, I assume that I will stay," Miran said on Bloomberg Television. Trump could name a nominee to succeed Fed Chair Jerome Powell by the first week of January, CNBC reported on Monday.
Miran has established himself as the Fed's most dovish policymaker since joining the Fed in September to serve the last few months of a 14-year term after the unexpected resignation of Fed Governor Adriana Kugler.
MIRAN FAVORED BIGGER RATE CUTS
At each of the three policy meetings Miran has attended, he dissented in favor of a bigger rate cut than the quarter-point the majority agreed to.
His term expires on January 31, just days after the Fed's first policy-setting meeting of 2026, but he is permitted to stay until a successor is installed.
Asked if he would continue to argue for half-point interest rate cuts, Miran said he had yet to decide.
"As we continue reducing policy, I think you sort of get into territory where you can start micromanaging instead of (making) big cuts," he told Bloomberg TV. "And I don't know whether we're here yet, or it would still take a couple more cuts to get there, but at some point, you start to become OK with steady 25-basis-point cuts instead of 50-basis-point cuts."
The Fed's December 10 rate cut brought the target range for U.S. benchmark short-term borrowing costs to 3.50%-3.75%, in the upper range of policymakers' estimates for a neutral level that neither boosts nor brakes the economy.
About a third of the central bank's 19 policymakers felt the rate cut was unnecessary, based on projections published by the Fed at the time.
"My base case is that we can stay here for some period of time, until we get clearer evidence that either inflation is coming back down to target or the employment side is weakening more materially," Cleveland Fed President Beth Hammack, one of those rate-cut skeptics, told the Wall Street Journal in a podcast interview recorded on Thursday and published on the weekend.
Hammack said she felt inflation was too high to warrant rate cuts, and that November’s consumer price index of 2.7% probably understated 12-month price growth due to data distortions.
Miran called that hawkish view "wrong," even as he credited Powell with forging a consensus around policy easing among the deeply divided group.
"I think you have to give Chairman Powell credit for having wrangled three cuts out of these guys in succession," Miran said. "It's a cat-herding task."
Trump is considering three finalists for Fed chair, all of whom support the rate cuts that Trump says are a condition of getting the job.
(Reporting By Dan Burns; writing by Ann Saphir; editing by Rod Nickel)
