Chicago Fed Pres.: Inflation ‘Stickier than We Thought’ and Goods Inflation ‘Hasn’t Come down as Quickly as We Wanted’

On Friday’s broadcast of the Fox Business Network’s “Cavuto: Coast to Coast,” Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago President Austan Goolsbee said that inflation has “proved stickier than we thought.” And that this is because “goods inflation hasn’t come down as quickly as we wanted it to.”

Goolsbee stated, [relevant remarks begin around 3:50] “[T]he worst part of the economy is the inflation part, and, yes, it’s coming down, but it’s still well above where we want it to be, and it’s proved stickier than we thought.”

He added, “We’re not there. Look, it’s still — there [has] been cooling, and you emphasized that, and the thing that’s interesting, I thought, in the price data that came out today and was reflected in CPI, is, for all the talk about services, the thing that’s been different and why inflation’s been more persistent than we thought is that goods inflation hasn’t come down as quickly as we wanted it to. So, that’s the thing that everybody should put their eye on in the immediate term, is, are goods prices inflation — is it too high for one-off reasons like used cars were especially high, but that’s going to go away, or is there something more persistent? That’s the key.”

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