by Neils Christensen
Kitco
April 4 (Reuters) – The largest impediment to the U.S. central bank’s efforts to return inflation to its 2% target rate is the persistence of outsized price increases in the housing services sector, Chicago Federal Reserve President Austan Goolsbee said on Thursday.
“The biggest danger to the inflation picture in my view… (is) the continued high inflation in housing services,” Goolsbee said in remarks at an event hosted by local business associations in Oak Brook, Illinois.
He added that based on market data on rents for new leases, “I have been expecting it to come down more quickly than it has. If it does not come down, we will have a very difficult time getting overall inflation back to the 2% target.”