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Fed’s Goolsbee Says Uneasy About ‘Front Loading’ Rate Cuts

(Bloomberg) -- Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago President Austan Goolsbee signaled that he’s still apprehensive about delivering another rate cut at the central bank’s December meeting.

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Inflation “seems to have kind of stalled out and, if anything, given warnings of going the wrong way,” Goolsbee said Thursday at an event in Indianapolis. “So that makes me a little uneasy.”

A growing number of policymakers have expressed concern about lowering interest rates too much amid still-high inflation. At their meeting last month, when they delivered a second consecutive rate reduction, many officials leaned against another one in December, minutes from that gathering showed.

The consumer price index rose 3% in September, still above the Fed’s 2% target. Inflation had been cooling earlier this year before new tariffs pushed up prices.

“The economy’s pretty strong and I feel like eventually we’re going to be back to ‘rates can come down a fair amount,’” Golsbee said. “But in the near term I’m a little uneasy front loading too many rate cuts and counting on ‘this will be transitory and inflation will go back down.’”