The economy is coming back, but the Federal Reserve should not yet return to a more normal, less accommodative monetary policy, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston President Eric Rosengren said in remarks delivered at Husson University in Bangor, Maine, this week.

"It has been more than six years since the beginning of the last recession, and yet we still have a national unemployment rate of 6.7 percent, and the PCE [personal consumption expenditures] inflation rate is less than 1 percent – well below the 2 percent inflation target set by the Federal Reserve’s policymaking body, the Federal Open Market Committee," Rosengren said in his remarks.

While recent improvements have allowed the Fed to slowly pare back its asset purchases and become less precise in its forward guidance, Rosengren reiterated his view that "forward guidance should, for the time being, remain qualitative but increasingly be linked to progress in achieving our dual mandate based on incoming economic data."

"I believe the FOMC’s forward guidance should be consistent with keeping interest rates at their very low level until we are within one year of reaching full employment and our 2 percent inflation target – and the guidance could explicitly state that intention," he said.

Rosengren said he would like to see "a more productive state of affairs," where market participants are more attentive to the incoming data and how the data fit (or do not fit) with the expectations in the forward guidance – are "focused more on data and less on changes in the setting of monetary policy tools."