Fed’s Goolsbee Says Traditional Economic View May Cause Overshoot

Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago President Austan Goolsbee said policymakers shouldn’t place too much weight on the traditional economic idea that steep job losses are needed to quell inflation, which he said could lead officials to raise interest rates too high.

This traditionalist view, Goolsbee said, “misses key features of our recent inflationary experience and that, in today’s environment, believing too strongly in the inevitability of a large trade-off between inflation and unemployment comes with the serious risk of a near-term policy error.” The comments were prepared for delivery Thursday at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington.