Press conference exchange between DON LEE and Fed Chair Jerome Powell:

user: I’d like to ask you about the labor market As in August there were about 30 million persons claiming unemployment benefits Yet the BLS jobs report for August showed about 13½ million unemployed only about 6 million more than before the pandemic I wonder how you reconcile that and what you think the actual labor market conditions are

assistant: So, I mean, I think the overall picture—take a step back from this. The overall picture is clear, and that is that the labor market has been recovering, but that it’s a long way—a long way from maximum employment. I think that’s, that’s the bottom line on it. So, within that, though—take claims in particular. The number of claims, the quantity of claims, and, frankly, the fact that PUA claims are new—the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance claims—that’s a new system that had to be set up. The actual counting of the claims is, is volatile, and, and it’s very difficult to take much signal about the particular level. So, you know, because people were setting those systems up, and when they got them set up, they counted them all at once and things like that. I think, though, what you’ve seen is that the level of—certainly the level of initial claims has declined very sharply from the very high levels of March and April and is now at a lower level—continues either to be flat or gradually decline. It’s worth noting—and that’s good—it’s worth noting level is maybe five times the level of what claims were. Claims were around 200,000; now they’re 900,000, in that range, weekly for, for initial claims. So that just tells you, the labor market has improved, but it’s a long, long way from maximum employment, and it will be some time getting back there. I think that’s the best way to think about it. In many parts of the economy there’s just a lot of disruption, and it’s, it’s really hard to say precisely where we are. I’ll give you another example with—you know, we say unemployment’s 8.4 percent. But if you count those who are—who are misidentified as, as employed when they’re actually unemployed and you add back some part of the participation number—so if you were—if you had a job and you were in the labor force in February and you lost it because of the pandemic, some of you are now being reported as out of the labor force. But I—you know, I would—I would more look at those people as unemployed. If you add those back, the level of unemployment’s probably 3 percent higher. On the other hand, by that metric, the, the unemployment rate would have been in the—in the 20s in, in April. So the improvement has been quite substantial under any measurement. But the level is still quite high.

user: is—is it the Fed’s aim to get back to 35 percent or even lower?

assistant: Yes, absolutely. You know, I, I can’t be precise about a particular number, but let me just say, there was a lot to like about 3½ percent unemployment. It’s not a magic number. No one would say that number is the touchstone or that is, you know, maximum employment. I would just say, you asked about 3½ percent. A 3½ percent unemployment rate showed, you know, gains being shared very widely across the income spectrum—in fact, going more to people at the bottom end of the spectrum. It showed labor force participation coming up as—up above many estimates of its trend, as people who’d been out of the labor force were being pulled into a tight job market. There’s a lot to like about a tough—a tight job market, particularly in a world where we didn’t see inflation. So, yes, we’d love to get back to that. I mean, I would say, we would like to get back—rather than to a particular number, we’d like to get back to a strong labor market where wages are moving up, where people can find work, where labor force participation is holding up nicely. That’s what we’d really love to get back to. Now, of course we would—we need inflation to perform in line with, with our framework. But the good news is, we think we can have quite low unemployment without raising troubling inflation.