This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Liz Hoffman: How do you explain the gap between the White House’s economic forecasts and the Fed’s?

Stephen Miran: It’s a different purpose for the forecasts and so you’d expect the outcomes of the two forecasts to differ as well.

What’s the clearest argument you have for aggressive rate cuts?

There’s two reasons. One relates to inflation. So I’m more sanguine on the inflation outlook than a lot of my colleagues in the Federal Reserve. Part of that is because I expect significant disinflationary pressure to come through the shelter channels; housing is the biggest expense for most people.

Until measured inflation catches up to actual market rents, there’s a significant lag, and that lag is finally closed. … The other reason why shelter inflation has been kind of materially lower in expectation is because of changing population policy. … There’s significant economic evidence that immigration causes increases in shelter costs.

The increase in population growth last year drove the neutral rate higher, the decrease in population growth this year is driving it lower, and that means that policy was much looser last year than people thought. … My view is that the policy rate has become much more restrictive this year, and so therefore we have to get close to neutral in a fast way.

Should the US be considering some kind of tariff assistance for businesses?

What I will say is the way it’s played out has been a lot closer to how I predicted it would be, which is that there would be no real material signs of growth drags; no real material signs of inflation spike. And it seems to me that … you [may] see significant inflation from tariffs, but it has not yet materialized.

When you think about this in the trade context, who’s more flexible? I think it comes down to, again, we as the importer — we’re more flexible, because we can allocate our demand across borders. We can buy from a country that we have a better trade deal with. We can make stuff at home; the producers, the factories, are stuck in place. … and so this means that the burden of the tariff will ultimately fall on the exporting countries.

Do you think that AI broadly could be deflationary?

I think AI has the potential to really raise the productivity growth rate in the economy, which would be great. I think it’s very difficult to anticipate exactly how it’s going to shake out in the labor market.

I don’t know exactly how AI is going to shake out. I don’t think anybody does. And if anybody gave me complete certainty about how AI is going to shake out, I’d probably laugh at them for being a hubristic fool.

How could a surge in productivity complicate the Fed’s dual mandate?

I think it’s worth emphasizing that population growth is usually something that changes only very, very slowly … but we’ve had the biggest population growth shocks of our lifetimes in both directions in the space of just a few years … which has been completely crazy. So there are a lot of cross-currents in the labor market that make it a little bit difficult to read.

What Congress assigned us is pursuit of maximum employment. Right now, I think 30% of employment is deeply incompatible with maximum employment. But in a world in which technological change is so wild that something like that is happening, I think you’d have to say, ‘OK, what actually is maximum employment?’ I don’t know. That’s sort of a bigger-picture philosophical question that is sort of outside of the scope. … For the near term, I don’t see something like that as a plausible risk that I’m concerned about.