Fed’s Goolsbee: The jobs report is “superb”

In an interview at Bloomberg, Chicago Federal Reserve Bank President Austan Goolsbee said on Friday that he considered the latest job market report to be “superb” and noted that additional reports like this would increase his confidence that the US economy has reached full employment with low inflation.

Key Takeaways

Do not want to react too much to one data point.

If we get more job reports like this, I’ll be more confident we are settling in at full employment.

Strong job reports are likely to mean strong GDP growth.

A large majority of Fed policymakers feel rates are going to come down a lot over the next year-18 months.

You got to be careful keeping rates as restrictive as they are.

There are some signs inflation might undershoot target.

We are still a way off from having to sort out where neutral rate is.

A broad set of data shoes the labour market is cooling.

If productivity keeps booming, that implies higher growth, higher neutral rate.