(Bloomberg) — The Federal Reserve probably needs to raise interest rates by 50 basis points at each of its next three or four meetings and will likely have to endure a recession to help get inflation back down to its 2% target, according to the central bank’s former vice chair Alan Blinder.

Fed Chair Jerome Powell will and his team likely raise rates by one-half percent at next week’s policy meeting. It is the second such increase. They’ve lined up a similar-sized hike for July, but have left their options for the following meeting, in September, open.

“If the picture stays roughly the way we think it will look as of today, then I think they’re going to need more than two 50s,” in June and July, Blinder said. “Maybe three or four meetings of 50.”

Blinder, who served on the Fed in the 1990s under then-chief Alan Greenspan, sees a recession next year as likely: he puts the odds of one occurring at “somewhat above” 50%. The Fed will need to be “really, really lucky” to avoid a contraction in gross domestic product, he said in an interview Wednesday.

US central bank is trying create an economic soft landing — reducing decades-high inflation to acceptable levels, without starting a recession. Due Friday, the consumer price index will show that prices increased 8.2% last May compared to a year ago, and 0.7% compared with April. It is expected that this was driven primarily by food items and energy.

The Fed prefers a different inflation gauge — the personal consumption expenditures price index — which rose 6.3% in April from a year earlier, more than three times the central bank’s goal. Core prices rose 4.9% after excluding volatile energy and food costs.

Blinder, who’s now a professor at Princeton University, said inflation might rise in the near term because of disruptions in commodity markets from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and supply-chain backups stemming from lockdowns in China to combat Covid-19.

He said that these pressures would eventually dissipate. That will leave what Blinder reckons is roughly two percentage points of domestic-demand-driven core inflation that the Fed will need to take care of.

“We have to slow down GDP growth, we have to slow down employment growth,” the former monetary policy maker said. “That means the unemployment rate has to go somewhat higher.” 

He said that it would take 4 to 5 years for inflation to fall by 2 percentage point under an old economic rule. “They have to be thinking about doing something like that,” Blinder said of the Fed.

There are always risks. He acknowledged that inflation can affect expectations and become entrenched in an economy if it remains elevated for too long. 

Fortunately for the Fed, that hasn’t happened yet — longer-term inflation expectations remain contained, and there’s been no evidence of a wage-price spiral, Blinder said. The job market is strong, and unemployment has fallen to 3.6%, a low that was almost 50 years ago.

“I’m hoping for a recessionette,” a modest economic downturn without a severe rise in unemployment, Blinder said.

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