Goolsbee Sees Signs Fed Can Avoid Sparking a Recession With Rate Hikes

(Bloomberg) — The Federal Reserve sees signs that it can avoid triggering a recession in the US even as it has raised interest rates aggressively to put the brakes on inflation, Chicago Fed President Austan Goolsbee said. 

“You don’t want to land the plane nose down. So we’re trying to balance off — can we slow the inflation without sending it into a recession,” he said of the US economy in an interview Friday on PBS NewsHour. “We’ve had some promising indicators on that on that front, but it’s always a possibility.” 

Policymakers raised rates by a quarter percentage point at a meeting earlier this month, bringing their benchmark to a target range of 5% to 5.25% and signaling they may be ready to pause their tightening cycle.  

Prices climbed 4.9% from a year earlier in April, consumer price index data released Wednesday showed, the first sub-5% reading in two years. 

Excluding food and energy, the so-called core inflation rate also moderated. While the Fed targets a different yardstick of annual price movements – the personal consumption expenditures gauge — all measures are running at more than double its 2% target pace. 

“By those measures of core prices, we’ve seen progress but it still shows that that inflation is too high,” Gooslbee said. “We just have to keep getting more price information across these categories before we can say with comfort, we’re on a path back.”

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