On Tuesday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “Special Report,” Chicago Federal Reserve Bank President Austan Goolsbee stated that people say they’ve been hurt by President Joe Biden’s policies in part because wages haven’t kept up with inflation and that gas and grocery prices have a huge impact on how people feel.
Host Bret Baier asked why people say they’ve been hurt by Biden’s economic policies
Goolsbee responded that he’s not sure he can do a good job explaining it and he, along with the rest of the Fed, tries to avoid the political side of things.
He added that while employment numbers have been great, inflation numbers have been poor even though there’s been improvement in 2023.
Baier then asked, “Let’s talk from a Fed perspective about, is it a concern that wages have not kept up with inflation and maybe this explains some of this, the feeling part of it?”
Goolsbee answered, “Yeah, look, I think there’s an element of the cost of living. That always becomes an issue when there’s inflation. And that, for sure, over the last two, three years, has been the biggest negative in the economy, has been that we missed so badly on inflation. And, like I say, that’s a dilemma that’s facing all the central banks and all the advanced economies of the world. I think the other things that in the past have been correlated with people not feeling it are very public prices like [the] price of gasoline, [the] price of groceries. They tend to have an outsized impact on how people feel. It tends to lag a bit actual economic conditions, it takes a while for that to work its way through. And there is always a partisan component that has risen up. When Donald Trump’s the president, Democrats [report] they don’t feel it on the economy. When Joe Biden’s the President, the Republicans [say] they don’t feel it on the economy. So, there are a lot of factors that are floating around in there.”
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