Austan Goolsbee, president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, during a Bloomberg Television interview at the Federal Reserve’s Jackson Hole Economic Policy Symposium in Moran, Wyoming, on August 21, 2025.
Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago President Austan Goolsbee said a lack of inflation data during the government shutdown makes him more uneasy about continuing interest rate cuts.
“If there are problems developing on the inflation side, it’s going to be a fair amount of time before we see that,” Goolsbee said Thursday on CNBC. “That makes me even more uneasy.”
The Chicago Fed chief noted there aren’t as many private-sector data sources for inflation as there are for the labor market, so policymakers don’t have as clear a view into what’s going on with prices during the ongoing shutdown as they do with hiring. “I have some concerns, and I lean more to the ‘When it’s foggy, let’s just be a little careful and slow down,’” he said.
Policymakers last month lowered interest rates for a second straight meeting in an effort to bolster the labor market following a sharp slowdown in hiring over the summer. But inflation, which at 3 percent in September remained above the Fed’s 2 percent target, has also raised concerns among some officials that it will take longer to come down than they thought.
Goolsbee said a tick up in core services inflation worries him because it shows price pressures persist even outside of categories directly impacted by tariffs, and because it tends to be a more persistent form of inflation.
Service prices, not counting energy-related ones, rose 3.5 percent in the year through September. A real-time indicator of unemployment published today by the Chicago Fed, based on private-sector data sources, suggested the jobless rate stood at 4.36 percent in October, nearly unchanged from 4.35 percent in August.
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