Bernanke says Fed focused on exit strategy

JEKYLL ISLAND, Ga (Reuters) - The U.S. Federal Reserve is working intensively on ways to eventually pull back the massive stimulus it has put into the economy to achieve its desired inflation goals, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said on Monday.

"A majority of the members who made these projections just recently took 2 percent as being an appropriate number" for inflation, he said. "Somewhere between 1-1/2 to 2 percent is basically the number that our committee has individually stated is the appropriate medium-term inflation rate.

"To achieve that we need to demonstrate that we will be able to exit from the balance sheet position that we currently have, and have been working on this intensively," he said in response to questions after a speech to a conference organized by the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta.

(Reporting by Mark Felsenthal and Alister Bull; Editing by Leslie Adler)