Federal Reserve officials may need to raise interest rates as high as 6.5% to defeat inflation, according to new research that was sharply critical of the central bank’s initially slow response to rising prices. In a paper presented Friday at a conference in New York, a quintet of Wall Street economists and academics argue that policymakers still have an overly-optimistic outlook and they will need to inflict some economic pain to get prices under control. “Our analysis casts doubt on the ability of the Fed to engineer a soft landing in which inflation returns to the 2% target by the end of 2025 without a mild ... (full story)