Federal Reserve officials have effectively pushed back against a narrative in financial markets over the past week that policymakers are envisioning a pivot away from tightening amid evidence of a turn in the economy.

Four Fed district-bank presidents highlighted in remarks on Tuesday that there was no sign yet of inflation easing. San Francisco Fed President Mary Daly said "we are still resolute and completely united” in the objective of getting inflation down to around the 2% target.

Remarks from Daly, Cleveland’s Loretta Mester and Chicago’s Charles Evans helped trigger a surge in Treasury yields Tuesday as traders reconsidered how much more the central bank will raise interest rates and whether it could move to cut them in early 2023. Yields had tumbled after Chair Jerome Powell said July 27 "it likely will become appropriate to slow the pace of increases” as the Fed’s stance tightens further.

Mester told the Washington Post during a livestreamed event that she wants to see "very compelling evidence” that month-to-month price increases are moderating before she can say the U.S. central bank’s tightening cycle is accomplishing its goal of curbing inflation.

Evans, speaking with reporters at his bank, said policymakers are "probably at least a couple of reports away” from seeing the kind of improvement in the inflation data that would reinforce the notion that they are on the right track with monetary tightening.

The central bank’s policy-setting Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) raised its benchmark rate by three quarters of a percentage point last week for the second straight month, marking the most aggressive back-to-back increases in more than a generation to tame inflation.

Data since then has shown that U.S. gross domestic product contracted for the second consecutive quarter in the April-June period, meeting the threshold that some economists use as a rule of thumb to judge that the economy has fallen into a recession.

Powell told reporters after the July 27 decision that officials could increase rates by the same amount at the next meeting — depending on readings from the economy between now and then — though they would slow at some point in the future. The FOMC next gathers Sept. 20 to 21.

"I really am looking to see what those data tell us to see if we can downshift a little bit the pace of rate hikes, or if we need to continue” the outsize increases, Daly said Tuesday in an interview on LinkedIn.

Economists surveyed by Bloomberg before last week’s decision said they expected the FOMC to lift rates by a half point in September, then shift to quarter-point hikes at the remaining two meetings of the year. That would bring the upper range of the central bank’s policy target to 3.5% by the end of 2022, the highest level since early 2008.

Speaking at an event in New York, St. Louis Fed President James Bullard reiterated that the central bank probably should increase its benchmark rate to a range of 3.75% to 4% by the end of the year.

Evans said he is hopeful that a path to a 3.5% federal funds rate by the end of the year — via a half-point increase at the September meeting and quarter-point increases at policy meetings in November and December — is "still reasonable.”

If inflation doesn’t show signs of improvement, the FOMC "might have to rethink the path a little bit higher, but I would be a little nervous about responding too much, too early,” he said.

Last week, before the release of GDP data, Powell pushed back on suggestions that the U.S. is already in a recession.

The National Bureau of Economic Research’s business-cycle dating committee — the official arbiter of U.S. recessions — does not adhere to the two-quarter-contraction view. Instead, the group of eight elite academic economists looks at half a dozen monthly economic reports to see a "significant decline in economic activity that is spread across the economy and that lasts more than a few months.”

Bullard said the U.S. economy is unlikely to experience a recession, and that the Fed "may be able to disinflate in an orderly manner and achieve a relatively soft landing,” where it slows inflation without sparking a contraction.

Mester said the slowing seen in some data points isn’t enough to label the U.S. economy as being in a recession. A pullback in activity is what the Fed wants to engineer in order to get demand in line with the constrained supply side of the economy.

"When a recession is in place, you will see the labor market deteriorate pretty rapidly, and certainly right now, the labor market is very healthy,” she said. "My forecast for this year is that we will be growing below trend, but that’s necessary in order to get price increases under control.”