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Key Takeaways
- By some measures, the U.S. job market is stabilizing, but consumers are growing more pessimistic about its prospects, Fed officials noted in separate speeches Friday.
- One Fed governor said he was “cautiously optimistic” while a regional bank president said the outlook feels “precarious” for workers.
- An upcoming jobs report next week will provide some indication of whether the Fed’s recent interest rate cuts have breathed any life into hiring.
Federal Reserve officials gave contrasting assessments of the economic outlook Friday, with one having “cautious optimism” and the other noting that to workers, the situation seems “precarious.”
In separate statements, Fed Governor Philip Jefferson and Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco President Mary Daly discussed how the job market has been slower than usual in recent months, although employers have avoided mass layoffs so far. Jefferson, speaking at the Brookings Institution think tank in Washington, noted the unemployment rate, at 4.4% in December, has “changed little” in recent months, suggesting that the job market is stabilizing after a slowdown.
Daly, in a blog post, highlighted that working households don’t feel optimistic these days, cautiously or otherwise. Recent surveys of consumer sentiment show that people expect unemployment to rise and jobs to become more scarce over the next six months. And open positions are already pretty hard to come by, having fallen to their lowest since the pandemic in December.
What This Means For The Economy
If the job market takes a turn for the worse, the Federal Reserve could slash interest rates in an effort to stave off mass unemployment.
If the labor market is as fragile as the public thinks, that’s a problem for the Federal Reserve as it tries to fulfill its dual mandate to keep employment up while pushing inflation down toward its elusive goal of a 2% annual rate.
“We’ve been in a relatively low-hiring, low-firing environment for some time,” Daly wrote. “That may persist, but workers are aware that things could change quickly, leaving them in a no-hiring, more-firing labor market. With inflation printing above the FOMC’s 2% goal, this rightly feels precarious.”
Fed officials have been divided about whether to cut the central bank’s benchmark interest rate to help the job market, or keep it higher for longer to fight inflation. The Fed chose to hold rates flat at its most recent meeting in January, and is expected to do so again at its next meeting in March. Before that, the Fed cut the rate by a quarter-point at each of its three previous meetings.
Despite their contrasting assessments, both officials arrived at the same conclusion for the road ahead: keeping an eye on the economic data in the coming months for signs that either the job market is collapsing or inflation is heating up again.
“The current policy stance is well positioned to address the risks to both sides of our dual mandate,” Jefferson said. “I believe that the extent and timing of additional adjustments to our policy rate should be based on the incoming data, the evolving outlook, and the balance of risks.”
The next important piece of economic data is set to arrive Wednesday, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes its report on job creation and the unemployment rate for January. That report was initially supposed to come out Friday, but was delayed by the brief government shutdown earlier in the week.
Forecasters expect the economy to have added 60,000 jobs, up from 50,000 in December, and the unemployment rate to stay flat, according to a survey of economists by Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal.
“We must watch both sides of our mandate,” Daly wrote. “Americans deserve both price stability and full employment, and we can’t take either for granted.”
