Chicago Fed President Austan Goolsbee cautioned against overinterpreting April’s softer inflation data, noting on NPR that it’s still too early to gauge the true impact of rising US import tariffs.
While recent consumer price figures suggest inflation may be easing, Goolsbee stressed that Fed needs more clarity before making firm policy judgments, describing the current environment as one filled with “a lot of dust in the air.”
He acknowledged that the data so far “suggest that it’s going okay,” but emphasized the difficulty of drawing long-term conclusions amid ongoing short-term volatility.
“It’s just not realistic,” he said, “to expect businesses or central banks to be jumping to conclusions” in such an uncertain setting.
