Chicago Fed President Austan Goolsbee joins 'Money Movers' to discuss recent jobs data, inflation levels, how the Fed should address current economic conditions, and more.
What Austan Goolsbee said
Written from the verified transcript and checked against it. Every figure links to the moment it was said.
Chicago Fed President Austan Goolsbee said the job market has been 'stable without being good' for a year and a half, with hiring rates at recession-like lows but layoff rates at boom-like lows, and no evidence of rapid deterioration. On inflation, he said it is not just energy, noting services inflation has been 'higher than is comfortable' for several months and the Fed has been above its 2% target for five years, with progress stalling last year and prices rising in the last three months. He said everything should be 'on the table' at the FOMC, but the committee's framework calls for assessing which mandate side deviates more and how long deviations last, distinguishing one-time price increases from lasting shocks. He expressed skepticism about forward guidance, preferring to look at all data including food and energy, and warned that AI-driven investment could overheat the economy if productivity gains are anticipated before they materialize.
Key takeaways
Goolsbee said the job market is 'stable without being good,' with hiring at recession-like lows and layoffs at boom-like lows.
Inflation has been above the Fed's 2% target for five years, with services inflation running 'higher than is comfortable' for several months.
Goolsbee said the FOMC's framework calls for assessing which mandate side deviates more and how long deviations last, not pre-committing to a response.
Goolsbee warned that AI-driven investment could overheat the economy if productivity gains are anticipated before they arrive.
Been left behind. Yeah, all-time high for both earlier this morning. Thanks, Mike. For more on the jobs number and the economy overall, let's get to Steve Liesman with a very special guest today. Hey, Steve.
Hey, Carl. Thanks very much. We're joined from California by Chicago Fed President Austan Goolsbee. Austan, thanks for joining us this morning. Just so much.
Hey, let's start off with the jobs report. It came in quite above expectations. Unemployment rate remaining stable at 4.3%. What's your overall take on the job market?
Yeah, pretty much stable for a year and a half. I characterize that we've been stable without being good. If you look at the rates, the unemployment rate has been stable, the hiring rate's been stable, the layoff rate's been stable, the vacancy rate has been stable. So I still think there's not a lot of evidence that the job market is falling apart. And on the other side of the Fed's mandate, inflation hasn't been great. And it's been going the wrong way lately.
I want to get to inflation more specifically. But what's not good about the job market? You've been above 100,000 for a couple of months in a row. You're at a relatively low unemployment rate. And people think that.
The part that's not good is the hiring rate. I mean, the hiring rate is—we're in a low, high or low fire environment, as they say. The hiring rate is low enough it would correspond to kind of the depths of a recession. But at the same time, the layoff rate is as low as would be at the peak of a boom. So we're getting a little bit of a cross-current in the data, but it's been stable. That's the thing that I want to emphasize. That to me, there's not a lot of evidence that the job market is deteriorating in any rapid basis.
All right. Let's go to the other side of the mandate, the inflation side. It has been elevated. Is it all energy? And are you willing just to look through it? Or is there a more stern response from the central bank required here?
Well, that's two questions. The second one, let's hold off for a second. I don't think it's just energy. Energy is adding on to it. It's more than just that inflation is elevated. It was already elevated before the war. Then the war increased oil prices. Now it's even more elevated. I think to me, the most concerning part is that if you look at services inflation, that's not coming from tariffs. That's not coming from oil prices. It's for several months in a row now been higher than is comfortable and going the wrong way. And to pile that on, we've been above the 2% Fed target for five years now. We stopped making progress last year and now in the last three months it's going up instead of down. We got to just keep an eye on this because if everybody starts presuming that inflation rates are going back to something like what they were a few years ago, we would be in a bit of a pickle as a central bank.
Fed Chair nominee says has repeated several times, inflation is a choice. And I'm assuming by that metric that you guys are making the wrong choice. If inflation is continuously above target, are you thinking about whether or not you need to make a choice to address that inflation?
11 more exchanges in this transcript
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Goolsbee, A. (2026, May 8). Watch CNBC's full interview with Chicago Fed President Austan Goolsbee [Interview transcript]. CNBC Television. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/893047/
MLA
Austan Goolsbee. "Watch CNBC's full interview with Chicago Fed President Austan Goolsbee." CNBC Television, 8 May. 2026. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/893047/.
BibTeX
@misc{goolsbee2026_893047,
author = {Austan Goolsbee},
title = {Watch CNBC's full interview with Chicago Fed President Austan Goolsbee},
howpublished = {Interview transcript, CNBC Television. CEOInterviews.AI},
year = {2026},
month = {may},
url = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/893047/},
note = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}
