In an interview with CNBC Monday morning, St. Louis Fed President James Bullard said that “cumulative progress” in addressing the U.S. unemployment rate has been good under the Fed’s quantitative easing (QE) program. He concludes that there is no hurry to begin tapering the central bank’s $85 billion monthly asset purchases. As recently as June, Bullard was arguing that “the [FOMC] must defend its inflation target when inflation is below target as well as when it is above target.” That June no vote on continued easing was Bullard’s last vote against the Fed’s purchasing program.

Bullard has been persuaded by the numbers. He said today that tapering of the Fed’s QE program should be “data dependent,” and so far the data does not show that inflation is on its way back up to the Fed’s target of 2%. As the unemployment rate continues to improve, said Bullard, the “probability of a taper goes up.”

Bullard thinks the Fed can be patient because there is still room on the bank’s balance sheet for more asset purchases. He pointed out that the United States trails Japan, the European Union and the United Kingdom in the central banks’ balance sheet to GDP ratio. He said, “If something bad is going to happen … with the balance sheet, these other central banks should have passed that and already had that experience and they haven’t.”

The inflation argument against the Fed’s QE program has been almost entirely debunked by the evidence. Inflation is not rising, it has been falling. Bullard has come around to the view that a little more inflation is needed to keep job growth coming. And as for tapering, as he said, “What’s the hurry?”

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