(Reuters) - Cleveland Federal Reserve Bank President Loretta Mester said on Monday that the economic outlook for the U.S. is brightening, but signaled she’s not ready to back away from the easy monetary policy that’s helping support that growth. “I’m thinking that we’ll see a very strong second half of the year, but we are still far from our policy goals,” Mester said in an interview on CNBC, noting that U.S. employment remains 8.4 million jobs short of the level in February 2020. “I think we need to be very deliberately patient in our approach to monetary policy,” she added.