WASHINGTON: Higher interest rates will stay in place until the US Federal Reserve is confident that surging inflation is on a path toward stability, according to a Fed meeting summary released this week, reported Xinhua.

The summary is from the Fed's December meeting, which saw a rate hike of a half percentage point that followed several other rate increases from previous months.

"Participants generally observed that a restrictive policy stance would need to be maintained until the incoming data provided confidence that inflation was on a sustained downward path to 2 per cent," according to the summary, which was released on the Fed's website.

Such a development was "likely to take some time", the summary said.

The United States is seeing the worst inflation in 40 years, and the central bank raised interest rates several times last year in a bid to fulfill the Fed's mandate of keeping inflation at 2 per cent.

In the year through November, US grocery prices surged to around 12 per cent, an increase not seen in decades.

-- BERNAMA