The Federal Reserve would need to begin to cut interest rates if inflation continues to make good progress back down to the central bank's 2% target rate but weeks more of data need to be in hand before any such judgment could be made, Chicago Fed President Austan Goolsbee said on Friday.

"If we continue to make surprising progress, faster than was forecast on inflation then we have to take that into account in determining the level of restrictiveness," Goolsbee said in an interview with broadcaster CNBC. "But we don't want to commit ourselves before the job is done."

He added that the Fed needs clear evidence that inflation is on track to return to the target rate before changing its key policy rate.

(Reporting by Lindsay Dunsmuir; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama)