A Fed Pivot? Not Yet, Policymakers Suggest, as Rapid Inflation Lingers.

Federal Reserve officials stated Tuesday that they intend to continue raising rates in an effort to contain inflation, which puts them in direct conflict with investors who are more optimistic about the outlook for interest-rate moves.

Stocks prices rose following the Fed’s meeting last week, as investors celebrated what some interpreted as a pivot: Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair, said the central bank would begin making rate decisions on a meeting-by-meeting basis, which Wall Street took as a signal that its rate moves might soon slow down.

Fed officials have since reiterated that rate increases are not on the horizon.

Mary C. Daly, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, said in an interview on LinkedIn on Tuesday that the Fed was “nowhere near” done raising interest rates. Charles L. Evans (the president of Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago) stated to reporters that he would prefer a September rate hike of at least half- or three quarters of a percentage point.

In an interview last week, Neel Kashkari, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis said that he didn’t understand why markets were reducing their expectations for Fed rate rises.

These comments indicate that the central bank is still determined to keep inflation under control, increase borrowing costs and slow down the economy. They were especially notable considering that all three officials favor low interest rates. They are all committed to raising borrowing costs, which shows that the Fed is united behind its push for lower prices.

The Fed’s work is “nowhere near almost done,” Ms. Daly said, adding, “We’ve been with this high inflation for a while, and really getting too confident that we’ve already solved the problem, I think, would be a mistake.”

Markets reacted to the Fed’s comments on Tuesday, causing stock and key government bond prices to fall.

The Fed’s most recent forecasts, released in June, projected that officials would raise interest rates to 3.4 percent by the end of the year, up a full percent from their current range of 2.25 to 2.5 percent. Mr. Evans suggested Tuesday that he still believed that such a path was reasonable.

Investors expect the Fed to continue on the path it set in June. But after last week’s Fed meeting, they began placing increasing odds on the possibility that the central bank would raise rates by less than forecast. Market pricing suggested that investors had slightly increased the odds of the Fed cutting rates next year. Officials have not disputed this.

“That’s a puzzle to me. I don’t know where they find that in the data,” Ms. Daly said. “The outlook I think is most likely is really that we raise interest rates, and then we hold them there for a while.”

At their September meeting, officials will release their next set rate projections.

Both Mr. Kashkari and Mr. Evans suggested that they would favor a half-point increase in September — a slight slowdown from the three-quarter-point increases officials made in June and July — but that a third unusually large rate increase was possible.

In September, “50 is a reasonable assessment, but 75 could also be OK,” Mr. Evans told reporters on Tuesday.

Officials are trying limit the economy to slow down the labor market, reduce wage growth and lower demand to keep prices from rising. They still hope that they can achieve that without causing an economic recession.

The central bankers are well aware that prices have been increasing rapidly for more than one year. They rose 9.1 percent between June and June. Consumers may start to expect faster inflation and shift their behavior so that price increases last longer.

There are signs that the economy may be slowing due to inflation. Data released Tuesday by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York showed that households were taking out more debt as they tried and shoulder rising prices. However, it is not clear that the economy has entered a downturn.

“Seeing some pullback in activity is actually what we wanted to see,” Loretta J. Mester, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, said during a Washington Post Live interview on Tuesday. “Certainly, it hasn’t slowed enough (a) to call it a recession and (b) to see that moderation in demand” is carrying over to moderation in price increases.

Ms. Mester and her colleagues suggested that interest rate could rise more and that they were looking for a slowdown in inflation. She said that seeing one month of downward movement — and she cited a potential drop in inflation in July because oil prices had come down — would not be enough.

“You wouldn’t want to conclude too quickly that inflation is on a downward path, because of how high it is,” she said. “I want to see it broadly, across many inflation measures — not just one, not just two.”