Chicago Fed President Austan Goolsbee has refrained from pre-committing to Fed’s actions in September, insisting that every meeting is crucial when navigating the transition point. “When you’re around the transition point, every meeting is a live meeting and you’re trying to figure out trends, not just reflect one month’s data,” Goolsbee said yesterday.

Goolsbee is “guardedly optimistic” about Fed’s ability to stick to what he terms the “golden path,” bringing down prices without inducing a recession. He emphasized the importance of watching how core goods and housing inflation evolve in the coming months to remain on this path.

“Those are the two components that over the next three to six months, let’s call it, if we are to succeed to stay on the golden path, we’ve got to see progress on those two parts of inflation,” he said. He added that progress on services inflation isn’t currently necessary.

He also shared his perspective on the link between wages and inflation, suggesting that wages are more of a lagging indicator rather than a predictor of inflation. According to Goolsbee, if Fed officials focus too much on wages when shaping their policy, they could risk overshooting interest rates.

Chicago Fed President Austan Goolsbee, a voting member of this year’s monetary policy committee, expressed his ambivalence about the upcoming FOMC meeting in September. In a interview by Yahoo Finance, Goolsbee remarked, “I haven’t made up my mind for what should happen in September.”

Goolsbee underscored the significance of several key data points that the Fed will have to consider before the September meeting. “We’ll get several more major data points before the next meeting,” he elaborated, indicating a reliance on these forthcoming data to inform any decisions about the policy rate.

Despite the uncertainty, Fed President is satisfied with the current progress, remarking, “But it’s looking like we’re walking the line pretty well.” Goolsbee also suggested that future actions would need to be responsive to changing conditions, explaining that the Fed will have to “play by ear” on whether the policy rate is sufficiently restrictive.

Minneapolis Fed President Neel Kashkari has indicated Fed’s willingness to raise rates if necessary but maintains that the approach will be dictated by incoming data, as he said on CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday

Kashkari called that a “good progress as core inflation moved from 5.5% a year ago to 4.1%. However, he was quick to caution against complacency, adding, “But it’s still double our 2 percent rate. And so we don’t want to declare victory.”

His emphasis on a flexible, data-driven strategy was further evident in his comments, “If we need to hike — raise rates further from here, we will do so. But we’re going to let the data guide us and not prejudge the outcome.”

On the topic of future rate decisions, Kashkari kept all options open: “September and beyond. You know, we may or may not raise in September, but we also will continue to watch all the data, the inflation data, the wage data, as well as the unemployment data to make those assessments.”

Despite recent uncertainties, Kashkari expressed optimism about the economy’s resilience: “The economy continues to surprise how resilient it is. The base case scenario seems to be that we’ll have a slowing economy, but that we would avoid a recession.”