Chicago Federal Reserve Bank President Austan Goolsbee has claimed that the central bank has “weeks and months” of economic data to help it plan its interest rate agenda. Goolsbee explained that rate cuts will be timed according to when inflation reaches the Fed’s 2% target. Still, the Fed will not look to return prices to their levels before the inflation crisis.
“If you’re trying to get the price level back to what it was some years ago, you would really have to just crank down on the economy to do that, so that’s not in our card deck,” Goolsbee admitted during an interview on PBS. When asked about when the Fed could introduce rate cuts, the Chicago Fed president explained that the “weeks and months” of data would be used to determine this rather as opposed to only recent data.
For Goolsbee, Friday’s jobs report was a positive sign, with 353,000 jobs being added over the past month. Still, he warned that the underlying labor market may not be growing as many expect.