Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan said Wednesday despite recent surveys showing consumer confidence eroding, Americans are continuing to spend, the U.S. economy is strong, and growth will be solid, albeit slower, this year.

Although surveys indicate the public is increasingly worried about inflation and tariffs, Moynihan told CNBC, consumers are still spending fairly abundantly. However, most of their purchases are shifting from goods and into services.

“We’re in this classic moment where the consumer is saying, ‘I’m getting more pessimistic,’ in some of the surveys,” Moynihan said in the “Squawk Box” interview.

“But if you actually look what they’re doing day to day, they continue to spend, which means the economy ought to be holding up better than people think.”

The Bank of America chief sees gross domestic product tamping down to 2% from nearly 3% in recent quarters — and President Donald Trump’s tariffs reducing GDP by a mere 0.4 percentage points in the near term.

Eventually, Moynihan said, the economy will adjust and U.S. trade will be more balanced.

Moynihan called the 2% level “trend growth — that’s what we’ve all been trying to get to for 10 or 15 years after the financial crisis.

“We see the consumer continue to be solid, and that should bode well for the economy,” Moynihan continued.

“There’s a lot of questions out there, and I think that will sort through. But right now, we’re not talking about what could happen, we’re talking about is happening. The consumer continues to spend pretty strongly for the first part of this year.”

At 2 p.m. Wednesday, the Federal Reserve will issue its latest decision on interest rates, with analysts’ and economists’ consensus that rates will remain unchanged.

Moynihan said not only is keeping rates steady the right call, but the Fed is very likely to keep rates on hold throughout 2026.

“I would think, though, that the Fed would be a little cautious about cutting, not knowing what the impact of tariffs is going to be,” he said.

“It would seem that maybe they’d want to hold on to the firepower that they’ve built up over the last year or so. They shouldn’t be premature to try to boost the economy when it’s growing at 2%.”

Moynihan believes it would be better to keep a “real interest rate” closer to 3% rather the near zero it was in the years between the Great Recession of 2008 and the COVID pandemic.