Goldman Sachs vice chairman Robert Kaplan says AI is a key driver that will likely have a deflationary impact, but not in the immediate future.
In a new CNBC interview, the former Dallas Fed President says AI and excess industrial capacity in China are major forces that could eventually push inflation lower, but not anytime soon, because higher prices tend to be sticky.
“So I do believe that AI adoption will ultimately be disinflationary. I also believe that Chinese manufacturing overcapacity hasn’t gone away. That will be disinflationary. Here’s the issue. The question is when.
And right now, in 2026, we’re in a year where we’ve got, before this war, a number of tailwinds that would strengthen GDP growth and the jobs market cyclically. And our problem at the moment is prices are sticky.”
For now, Kaplan says the US economy is on a solid footing, despite tensions in the Middle East.
“Going back 40 days ago, we had tax incentives, tax refunds, accelerated depreciation. We had regulatory reform. We had the AI data center compute infrastructure boom. It made sense that, pre-war, we had a very solid economy.
And so I think it will take more than what’s happened so far to put a dent in it. It may take some of the wind out of the sails. But I would say a solid jobs report was probably consistent with what [Fed] expected. It’s what I would have expected.”
Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that the US added 178,000 jobs in March, with the unemployment rate ticking down to 4.3%.
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