The Federal Reserve needs more time and data to ensure inflation is truly subdued before cutting its key interest rate, Mary Daly, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco and a member of the Fed’s policy committee, said at a conference of the National Association for Business Economics Friday.

Her comments stuck to the line repeated by other Fed officials in recent weeks: with inflation seemingly on a bumpy path down to the central bank’s goal of a 2% annual rate—but not quite there yet—and the economy and labor market staying resilient, they’re in no hurry to cut interest rates.

“The economy is healthy, price stability is in sight, and there is more work to do,” she said.

Daly and other members of the Federal Open Market Committee are at a crucial stage of their attempt to bring the economy down to a “soft landing” (rather than a crash) from the high inflation that flared up in late 2021. Since March 2021, the central bank has stifled inflation by raising its key interest rate, and has held it at a 23-year high since July, raising borrowing costs on all kinds of loans, which discourages spending and drags down economic growth.

As inflation cools, they’re growing more concerned about the unwanted side effect of high rates, which is the potential for causing a recession, and have begun talking about easing the upward  pressure on interest for credit cards, mortgages, and other loans by cutting the fed funds rate.

Financial markets are mostly pricing in the first rate cut happening in June, according to the CME Group’s FedWatch tool, which forecasts rate movements based on fed funds futures trading data. Many of those bets were pushed back from March last week after a report on the Consumer Price Index showed inflation staying more stubborn than previously expected.

Daly noted the progress against inflation. The Fed’s preferred measure of inflation rose 2.6% over the year in December, down from a peak of 7.1% in June 2022.

“For households and businesses, the treadmill of persistently rising inflation slowed down,” she said.

However, she said there was a risk that the forces that have driven down inflation—such as increasing worker productivity—could reverse, and that disruptions such as the conflict in the Middle East, could reignite inflation.

Daly said the Federal Open Market Committee’s December projection of three quarter-point rate cuts in 2024 was a “reasonable” one.

She also cautioned against keeping rates too high for too long, which could threaten the Fed’s mission, mandated by Congress, of keeping prices stable while also ensuring the most people possible have jobs. If high interest rates cause mass layoffs,  “you’ve given people low inflation, but you’ve taken their jobs,” she said. “That’s not the dual mandate.”