General Bonds

By Kristina Cooke NEW YORK, (Reuters) - Three top U.S. Federal Reserve officials on Monday voiced concerns about the central bank's latest efforts to boost the economy, with one warning the Fed's bond buying might need to be curbed to head-off inflation. The remarks from Fed Governor Kevin Warsh, Dallas Fed chief Richard Fisher and Thomas Hoenig of the Kansas City Fed underscored the unease within the central bank about the decision to buy an additional $600 billion in government debt. Last week's decision has sparked an unusually vocal public debate among Fed officials and drawn the ire of many countries that say the United States is deliberately pushing down the dollar. Warsh raised the prospect that rising inflation risks could prompt the central bank to scale back the program even with unemployment still painfully high. "Policies should be altered if certain objectives are satisfied, purported benefits disappoint, or potential risks threaten to materialize," Warsh said. "We haven't bought ourselves an eight month holiday. We bought...

By Pedro Nicolaci da Costa JEKYLL ISLAND, Georgia (Reuters) - The Federal Reserve is trying to help a weak economy with its new $600 billion bond purchase plan, not jump-start inflation, central bank chairman Ben Bernanke said on Saturday. "We're not in the business of trying to create inflation, our purpose is to provide additional stimulus to help the economy recover and to avoid potentially additional disinflation, which I think we all agree could also be worrisome," Bernanke said. He was speaking alongside former top Fed officials Alan Greenspan and Gerald Corrigan at an event commemorating the 100th anniversary of a meeting on Jekyll Island that led to the creation of the U.S. central bank system. With an economy that is growing at just a 2 percent annualized clip and a jobless rate that remains stagnant at 9.6 percent, the Fed this week decided to provide a fresh, if controversial, push to the anemic recovery. Bernanke sought to quell controversy about the Fed's unconventional approach...