Austan Goolsbee, President and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, speaks to the Economic Club of New York in New York City, U.S., April 10, 2025.
Brendan McDermid | Reuters
Business owners and CEOs are already stocking up on inventory, and some American shoppers are panic buying big-ticket items in anticipation of President Donald Trump’s tariffs. The sudden buying binge could cause an “artificially high” level of economic activity, said Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago President Austan Goolsbee.
“That kind of preemptive purchasing is probably even more pronounced on the business side,” Goolsbee told CBS’ “Face The Nation” on Sunday, adding: “We heard a lot about preemptive building-up of inventories that could last 60 days, 90 days, if there [was] going to be more uncertainty.”
Businesses stockpiling inventory and consumers accelerating their purchasing decisions — buying an Apple iPhone now, say, rather than waiting until the fall — may inflate U.S. economic activity in April and lead to a slowdown in the coming months, Goolsbee suggested.
“Activity might look artificially high in the initial, and then by the summer, might fall off — because people have bought it all,” he said.
Sectors affected by Trump’s tariffs, particularly the auto industry, are most likely to heavily stock up on inventory now before import levies on goods from other countries potentially rise further, said Goolsbee. Many car parts, electronic components and other big-ticket consumer items are manufactured in China, for example, which currently faces a 145% total tariff rate on goods imported to the United States.
“We don’t know, 90 days from now, when they’ve revisited the tariffs, we don’t know how big they’re going to be,” Goolsbee said.
Some U.S. business owners who buy goods manufactured in China say they already can’t afford to place rush orders on inventory. Matt Rollens, owner and CEO of Granite Bay, California-based novelty drinkware company Dragon Glassware, says he’s temporarily holding his products in China because paying the 145% levy would force him to raise consumer prices by at least 50%, likely drying up customer demand.
Rollens has enough inventory in the U.S. to last roughly until June, and hopes the tariffs will be rolled back by then, he told CNBC Make It on April 11.
Short-term uncertainty and financial pain aside, the Fed’s Goolsbee expressed optimism about the country’s longer-term economic outlook.
“If we can get through this, it’s important to remember: The hard data coming into April was pretty good. The unemployment rate [was] around steady full employment, inflation [was] coming down,” he said. “It’s just a desire of people expressing they don’t want to back to ’21 and ’22, at a time when inflation was really raging out of control.”
“The Republicans should pray for rain”—the title of a paper published by a trio of political scientists in 2007—has been an axiom of American elections for years. The logic was straightforward: each inch of election-day showers, the study found, dampened turnout by 1%. Lower turnout gave Republicans an edge because the party’s affluent electorate had the resources to vote even when it was inconvenient. Their opponents, less so.
Inflation barely budged in April as tariffs President Donald Trump implemented in the early part of the month had yet to show up in consumer prices, the Commerce Department reported Friday.
The personal consumption expenditures price index, the Federal Reserve’s key inflation measure, increased just 0.1% for the month, putting the annual inflation rate at 2.1%. The monthly reading was in line with the Dow Jones consensus forecast while the annual level was 0.1 percentage point lower.
Excluding food and energy, the core reading that tends to get even greater focus from Fed policymakers showed readings of 0.1% and 2.5%, against respective estimates of 0.1% and 2.6%.
Consumer spending, though, slowed sharply for the month, posting just a 0.2% increase, in line with the consensus but slower than the 0.7% rate in March. A more cautious consumer mood also was reflected in the personal savings rate, which jumped to 4.9%, up from 0.6 percentage point in March to the highest level in nearly a year.
Personal income surged 0.8%, a slight increase from the prior month but well ahead of the forecast for 0.3%.
Markets showed little reaction to the news, with stock futures continuing to point lower and Treasury yields mixed.
People shop at a grocery store in Brooklyn on May 13, 2025 in New York City.
Spencer Platt | Getty Images
Trump has been pushing the Fed to lower its key interest rate as inflation has continued to gravitate back to the central bank’s 2% target. However, policymakers have been hesitant to move as they await the longer-term impacts of the president’s trade policy.
On Thursday, Trump and Fed Chair Jerome Powell held their first face-to-face meeting since the president started his second term. However, a Fed statement indicated the future path of monetary policy was not discussed and stressed that decisions would be made free of political considerations.
Trump slapped across-the-board 10% duties on all U.S. imports, part of an effort to even out a trading landscape in which the U.S. ran a record $140.5 billion deficit in March. In addition to the general tariffs, Trump launched selective reciprocal tariffs much higher than the 10% general charge.
Since then, though, Trump has backed off the more severe tariffs in favor of a 90-day negotiating period with the affected countries. Earlier this week, an international court struck down the tariffs, saying Trump exceeded his authority and didn’t prove that national security was threatened by the trade issues.
Then in the latest installment of the drama, an appeals court allowed a White House effort for a temporary stay of the order from the U.S. Court of International Trade.
Economists worry that tariffs could spark another round of inflation, though the historical record shows that their impact is often minimal.
At their policy meeting earlier this month, Fed officials also expressed worry about potential tariff inflation, particularly at a time when concerns are rising about the labor market. Higher prices and slower economic growth can yield stagflation, a phenomenon the U.S. hasn’t seen since the early 1980s.