Austan Goolsbee

Pandemic-program role: Not a program operator. In 2020 an academic economist whose research and commentary entered the PPP debate; from January 2023 president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago and a Federal Open Market Committee participant.
Institution · office: Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago · Office of the President · Type: Federal Reserve Bank president
Tenure (relief-relevant): Chicago Fed president from January 2023 to the present. Not in government while PPP and EIDL were lending.

Identity and role

Austan D. Goolsbee is president and chief executive of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. In that job he sits on the Federal Open Market Committee, which sets monetary policy, and leads a reserve bank that supervises banks and provides financial services to banks and to the U.S. government.

Biography / career arc

Goolsbee joined the faculty of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business in 1995 and was its Robert P. Gwinn Professor of Economics before he moved to the Fed. From 2009 through 2011 he was a member and then chairman of President Obama's Council of Economic Advisers, a cabinet-level post. He has also served on the Chicago Board of Education, the New York Fed's Economic Advisory Panel and the Congressional Budget Office's Panel of Economic Advisers. He holds a Ph.D. in economics from MIT and bachelor's and master's degrees in economics from Yale.

Pandemic-relief / PPP-EIDL role

In June 2020 Goolsbee and his Booth colleague Chad Syverson published a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper on why the economy collapsed. Using cellphone records of customer visits to more than 2.25 million businesses in 110 industries, they compared neighboring areas under different rules. Consumer traffic fell by 60 percentage points; legal shutdown orders explained 7 of them. Traffic began falling before the orders, tracked the number of COVID deaths in each county, and moved from larger, busier stores to smaller ones. States that lifted their orders saw equally modest recoveries. The orders did shift spending from "nonessential" to "essential" businesses and from restaurants and bars to grocers.

That finding reached the PPP evaluation. At the Brookings Papers conference in fall 2020, Glenn Hubbard and Michael Strain presented "Has the Paycheck Protection Program Succeeded?" Their method used firm size to separate firms that got PPP from those that did not, and Goolsbee warned that the shift toward smaller stores could confound it. What looked like PPP helping small firms, he said, could be demand moving toward them. He offered the authors his phone data.

He also argued for more relief. On November 30, 2020 Senator Mitch McConnell, pressing on the Senate floor for a second round of PPP, said Goolsbee had "called on Democrats to finally play ball." He then read Goolsbee's words into the record: "There are a lot of people really hurting. . . . [I]f they have to accept half a loaf, then they have to accept half a loaf."

Their own relief

No PPP or EIDL loan, grant or other pandemic-relief payment to Goolsbee personally appears in the Chicago Fed, NBER, Brookings or congressional documents cited here. He held no government post while the programs were lending.

Legal status / controversies

Goolsbee has not been charged with a crime, and no enforcement action names him in the documents cited here.

Where they are now (2025–2026)

The Chicago Fed lists Goolsbee as its president and CEO. He took the post in January 2023, when, he told Tyler Cowen in a June 2025 interview, Bloomberg's economists put the chance of a recession that year at 100 percent. In the same interview he said the post-pandemic inflation was not all demand. It began while unemployment was above 6 percent, struck countries that had spent far less on stimulus, and fell in 2023 as supply chains healed rather than when stimulus ended. "I do think there was a serious demand component," he said, but he found the case that inflation was "predominantly or entirely demand unpersuasive."

Sources held in this archive

Section 13(3) and the Fed Balance Sheet
The Federal Reserve and Pandemic Relief: An FAQ
The CARES Weekend
The Public Balance Sheet Behind Private Relief

Jerome H. Powell — Fed chair through the pandemic facilities.
Neel Kashkari — fellow reserve-bank president prominent in the pandemic-response debate.