Goolsbee says lowering interest rates next fall is not a ‘certainty’

Austan Goolsbee, the president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, said lowering interest rates in the fall is not a “certainty.”

“I don’t think it’s a certainty, and I don’t like, as you know, tying our hands ahead of time when we got a lot of data to come in and everyone on the committee is going to get to speak their piece, and it’s a committee decision,” Goolsbee said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” when asked if it was a “certainty” that the Federal Reserve will lower rates.

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell hinted last month that the central bank could cut rates “as soon as” September if inflation and the job market continued to cool down. Annual inflation also fell below 3 percent for the first time since March 2021, the Labor Department reported last week.

The Federal Open Market Committee hiked rates to a range of 5.25 percent to 5.5 percent last July. Since then, the committee has voted to keep rates at the current range at each subsequent meeting.

Goolsbee said the committee has been emphasizing what economic conditions would be needed to cut rates.

“And we’ve been making clear for quite a while what economic conditions would be appropriate for us to cut rates, for us to hold rates where they are, and things like that. And I do think that the — we set an interest rate more than a year ago at a high level because we were fighting inflation, and the economic conditions today are very different than they were when we set the rate at this level,” he added.