Looking beyond the temporary effects on inflation of this year's fluctuations in oil and other commodity prices, almost all participants continued to anticipate that inflation over the medium-term would run at or below the 2 percent rate that the Committee judges to be most consistent with its statutory mandate. In one participant's judgment, appropriate monetary policy would lead to inflation modestly greater than 2 percent for a time in order to bring unemployment down somewhat faster. Some participants indicated that they saw persistent slack in resource utilization as posing downside risks to the outlook for inflation; a few participants judged that the highly accommodative stance of monetary policy posed upside risks to the medium-term inflation outlook.