Chicago Fed Pres. Goolsbee: Inflation ‘Hasn’t Come Down as Fast as We Wanted’

On Friday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “Your World,” Chicago Federal Reserve Bank President Austan Goolsbee stated that “inflation’s above where we want it to be.” And “It hasn’t come down as fast as we wanted.”

Host Neil Cavuto asked, “The fact of the matter is, it was a stunningly good jobs report. So, now the question is, is it so good it puts pressure on you and your colleagues to keep that interest rate spigot moving?”

Goolsbee responded, “A little. That’s partly, as you know, before the banking stresses began, the economy was looking quite hot. And inflation’s above where we want it to be. It hasn’t come down as fast as we wanted. And the job market has been, by far, the strongest part of the economy. So, you’ve got to take that into account. At the same time, we know that credit conditions like the ones we’re seeing now, in the past, have been correlated with recessions, credit crunches kind of have done the tightening work of monetary policy. So, in our phrase, as you know, data dependence, we’ve got to be data dependent. We’ve got to watch a lot of indicators, not just the unemployment.”

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