Fed's Bullard: May see asset sales late 2010

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Federal Reserve could sell off some assets later this year in an effort to whittle down its bloated balance sheet to avoid inflation, a senior Federal Reserve official said on Monday.

The Fed's purchases last year of longer-term Treasuries and other debt, undertaken to help revive the economy, were financed by adding cash to the financial system. But leaving large amounts of cash sloshing around as the economy strengthens risks fueling inflation.

"Maybe you get in the second half of 2010 or something like that, if things are going pretty well, maybe then you'd sell a little bit at that point and you'd try to see how the market reacts," St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank President James Bullard told Reuters in an interview.

The U.S. central bank should try to get its balance sheet, which has ballooned by more than $1 trillion, down to a normal size before the next recession strikes to ensure it has the ammunition it needs to counter a downturn, Bullard said.

After the Fed slashed interest rates to near zero in late 2008, it launched a buying spree of longer-term Treasuries, mortgage-backed securities and debt issued by housing finance agencies to provide further support for the economy.

Bullard, who is a voting member on the Fed's policy-setting panel this year, said his preference would be to begin selling off some assets before raising interest rates, although he said not all Fed policy-makers were likely to see it his way.

He said the idea would be not only to get the balance sheet back to a pre-crisis size, but to return it to holdings of mostly U.S. Treasury securities.

The St. Louis Fed chief has long been an advocate of more actively managing the Fed's assets -- either by selling them or by leaving open the option of buying more if the economy stumbles anew. The consensus view at the Fed favors shuttering the purchase programs as planned and relying on rate hikes initially to tighten financial conditions.

However, with an economic recovery seemingly on track, Bullard made clear officials had begun to debate how best to normalize the Fed's balance sheet. Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke could shed more light on the central bank's plans in congressional testimony on Wednesday.

Bullard said markets would be disrupted if they came to believe the Fed was planning large-scale sales of mortgage-backed securities. However, he said the idea of gradual sales as a strategy is under discussion.

"Selling has more sympathy than you might think. It's more a question of timing and speed," Bullard said.

"You'd kind of want the situation to be back to normal in some kind of time frame before the next storm comes for the economy so that at that point you'd have a fresh set of tools and you can react at that point," he said. "There will be a lot more discussion going forward about how exactly to do this."

Bullard's emphasis on downsizing the Fed's balance sheet reflects a view that the recovery is gaining steam.

Unemployment may have already peaked, and the economy should grow at an annual rate above 3 percent in the first half of 2010, he said. A report on Friday showed a surprise drop in the U.S. jobless rate to 9.7 percent in January from 10 percent in December.