(Bloomberg) -- Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago President Austan Goolsbee said financial markets may have gotten ahead of policymakers in assuming an aggressive path of rate cuts this year.

“They were getting the cart before the horse,” Goolsbee said Friday in an interview on Fox News. “What’s going to drive the decisions about rates is going to be the actual data.”

Fed officials updated their economic and rate projections at their December meeting, and while the median of those projections showed there would likely be three cuts this year, Goolsbee argued those are individual forecasts and shouldn’t be taken as a group decision about future policy.

Fed officials raised rates to a range of 5.25% to 5.5% in July, a 22-year high, but have left policy unchanged since then as inflation has continued to cool. None of the 19 policymakers see rates moving higher, according to the December projections, signaling the next policy move is likely a rate cut.  

Markets rallied after the apparent policy pivot, and investors continue to see the first rate cut coming as early as March.

Goolsbee said while the economic data on inflation is mixed, “if you take a step back, over the course of the last year we’ve had a very substantial drop in inflation.”

Goolsbee’s comments added to a chorus of policymakers this week who have pushed back against market expectations of a rate cut in March, saying it’s still too early to be confident that inflation is sustainably cooling, a precursor to normalizing policy.

“In this case, I do think there was a little bit of a mix up in the market about how the Fed Open Market Committee works,” said Goolsbee, who does not vote on policy this year. “We debate as a body and vote on today’s actions, we don’t debate and vote on future — we don’t make future decisions.”

Goolsbee repeated comments made earlier this week about the March meeting. In an interview with Reuters published Thursday, he said he’d be watching inflation data to determine when it would be appropriate to cut rates, but that it was too soon now to make a decision about March. 

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