(Reuters) – Chicago Federal Reserve Bank President Austan Goolsbee on Monday said while the U.S. employment data on Friday was weaker than expected, it does not look like a recession, but that Fed officials need to be cognizant of changes in the environment to avoid being too restrictive with interest rates.
“You only want to be that restrictive if you think there’s fear of overheating,” Goolsbee said in an interview on CNBC. “These data, to me, does not look like overheating.”
His comments came amid a global stock market selloff that accelerated on Monday in the aftermath of a disappointing U.S. employment report on Friday and the Fed’s decision last week to leave interest rates unchanged. Fed officials, however, signaled they could cut rates at their next meeting in September.
(Reporting by Lindsay Dunsmuir and Dan Burns; Editing by Toby Chopra)
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