Analysts surveyed by Bloomberg News last month forecast 2.1 percent growth in 2012, based on the median of 69 estimates.

Payroll Gains

The Beige Book said that "upward wage pressures were modest overall" for workers across the U.S. The Labor Department said Jan. 6 that 200,000 jobs were added to payrolls in December, the most since September. The jobless rate declined for a fourth straight month to the lowest since February 2009.

Even so, New York Fed President William C. Dudley said last week that the "outlook for unemployment is unacceptably high" and that it's "appropriate" for the Fed to consider steps to ease monetary policy, he said.

The residential real estate market "largely held steady at very low levels" except for increasing construction of multifamily homes, the Beige Book said. The rental market "tightened in some areas," the report said.

Last week, Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke and his colleagues began pushing harder for the Obama administration and Congress to try new programs to revive the housing market. The advocacy sparked criticism from two Republican senators, Tennessee's Bob Corker and Utah's Orrin Hatch, who said central bankers were supporting plans that would put taxpayers at risk.

The Fed said today that inflation and pressures to raise prices "were very limited" at the end of last year. Several district banks reported that "upward price pressures from rising commodity and input prices have eased substantially," the Fed said.

The central bank's preferred price gauge, which excludes food and energy costs, rose 1.7 percent in November from a year earlier. Fed policy makers prefer a long-run inflation rate, including all items, of 1.7 percent to 2 percent.

Lending "edged up overall" on higher demand from businesses, with the New York and Cleveland regions reporting increased loans in commercial mortgages, the Fed said. Consumer lending "was largely flat compared with the prior reporting period," the central bank said.

A separate Fed report Jan. 9 showed that consumer borrowing in the U.S. rose in November by the most in 10 years. Credit increased by $20.4 billion, the biggest jump since November 2001, to $2.48 trillion.