Goolsbee: ‘The Priority Should Not Be on GDP Growth and Job Growth, It Should Be on Inflation Rate’

EXCERPT:

GOOLSBEE: "It sounds like you’re playing into exactly the thing that I was saying in the market I don’t want to get into. I don’t like pre-committing what the rates are going to be at the next meeting, when we still have weeks to go on a lot of information to gather. It sounds like you're asking for even more than that, not just what I vote for on the next meeting, but what am I going to vote for over the next year. For sure, we cannot answer that until we see what the conditions are. That seems straight forward. My conditions for when we should be done is we’re back on path, clearly, to get inflation down to target. Now, we’ve made a lot of progress, and I think anybody who's saying that we’re stalling out on inflation or it hasn’t been enough would do well to remember this fact that we’re among the fastest falling inflation rate years in the last century. That’s a path that looks good, but it's not done yet. I mean, the inflation rate, while down, is still above where the target is, and I’m absolutely hammering that’s what we should be watching. The priority should not be on GDP growth and job growth, it should be on inflation rate."