The Chicago Fed president says rising prices, not job losses, are the primary economic threat as rate cuts remain off the tableChicago Federal Reserve President Austan Goolsbee isn’t mincing words about what keeps him up at night. “The biggest problem facing our economy right now is not the collapse of industry and the collapse of jobs; it’s that the prices have been rising too fast, we got an inflation problem and people hate inflation,” Goolsbee said. He described conditions as stable “without being good,” a phrasing that suggests the economy is treading water rather than swimming laps. Goolsbee has openly questioned whether these tariff-related pressures will fade or become permanent features of the inflation landscape. When a regional Fed president repeatedly identifies the same problem across multiple months and multiple formats, the consistency is the policy signal.