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Austan D. Goolsbee, president of the Chicago Fed, said there was still a risk of higher consumer prices and slower growth amid elevated uncertainty about the White House’s trade policy.
May 12, 2025, 2:26 p.m. ET
A temporary reprieve in trade tensions between the United States and China has reduced, but not eliminated, the odds of a shock to the economy that carries a whiff of stagflation, a top official at the Federal Reserve warned on Monday.
Austan D. Goolsbee, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, said tariffs and the uncertainty around President Trump’s policies still risked a combination of higher consumer prices and slower growth.
Mr. Goolsbee welcomed the decision by the United States and China to lower tariffs on each other’s imported products for 90 days. But he said the temporary nature of the deal and the extent of the levies still in place would weigh significantly on the economy.
“It is definitely less impactful stagflationarily than the path they were on,” Mr. Goolsbee, who is one of 12 Fed officials to vote on policy decisions this year, said in an interview. “Yet it’s three to five times higher than what it was before, so it is going to have a stagflationary impulse on the economy. It’s going to make growth slower and make prices rise.”
Under the agreement forged over the weekend, the United States reduced its tariff on Chinese imports to 30 percent from its current minimum 145 percent level, while China lowered its levy on American goods to 10 percent from 125 percent.
Taking into account these reductions, as well as the tariffs that remain in place with nearly all of America’s trading partners, economists estimate that consumers still face an effective tariff rate of around 15 percent.
