Markets are betting the first of the three interest rate moves expected this year will come at the Fed's next meeting in March.

That will allow the Fed's interest-rate setting body, the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), to wait for firmer signs of inflation, which has long run below the Fed's two percent target.

But changing economic conditions -- the massive tax cuts approved last month, recovering energy prices, a weaker US dollar, new trade tariffs and stronger global growth -- could combine with a widespread US labor shortage to spur wage gains and cause a demand-driven rise in inflation, analysts say.

At the same time the changing makeup of the FOMC appears to be leaning in a more hawkish, inflation-averse direction, which raises the chances the committee will raise rates four times rather than three.

"It looks like in 2018 it will be justified to be more hawkish," Diane Swonk, chief economist at Grant Thornton, told AFP. "You'll get doves becoming more hawkish much more rapidly when conditions are changing."

The 12 presidents of the regional Federal Reserve banks rotate as voting members of the FOMC each year, along with members of the Fed Board of Governors who always vote.

Chicago Fed President Charles Evans and Minneapolis President Neel Kashkari, who both opposed last month's rate hike, will not vote this year.

But Cleveland's Loretta Mester, who twice dissented in favor of higher rates in 2016, will become a voter.

Mester will be joined by San Francisco's John Williams, a centrist and ally of outgoing Chair Janet Yellen, and the Atlanta region's newly-appointed Raphael Bostic, who is an unknown but pegged as a dove by analysts at IHS Markit.

Thomas Barkin, who took over this month as president of the traditionally hawkish Richmond Fed also will be voting for the first time.

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