On Friday’s edition of NBC’s “Meet the Press Now,” White House National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett stated that “when we’re looking at all of the indicators, it’s looking like things are running very smoothly and that the economy is on the way up.” And the “weak” jobs numbers don’t match with that, but would if they were revised upwards the way August jobs numbers tend to be, and stated that had rates been cut earlier, “we’d probably be seeing stronger jobs numbers right now.”
Hassett said, “Well, right now, when we’re looking at all of the indicators, it’s looking like things are running very smoothly and that the economy is on the way up. We’ve got industrial production at an all-time high. We’ve got capital spending up 9% over the first half of the year. We’ve got the Atlanta Fed’s GDP now saying 3%, and so when you see low jobs numbers like this, you kind of wonder what’s going on. It’s a little bit discordant with everything else that we see in the picture. Now, Goldman Sachs put out a report yesterday that I found kind of interesting. It showed that the BLS has seasonal problems in August and that they tend to revise the number for this August up, over the last 15 years, by almost 70,000 jobs. And so, if that were to happen again, then, sort of, all the indicators would make sense. But right now, it does look like a weak number.”
He added that “the best measure of the overall economy is GDP.”
Hassett further stated, “I do have to concede that the jobs numbers are lower than make sense given everything else that’s going on and the futures markets right now are expecting the Federal Reserve to cut rates, and I think that, if they had done that a little bit earlier, we’d probably be seeing stronger jobs numbers right now.”
Hassett added that “we’re seeing a massive explosion in factory investment and in capital spending, and, again, the jobs numbers right now are inconsistent with those, and we’ll just have to see in the end. We’re getting a really big benchmark revision to the jobs numbers next week, and we really need to start to see the jobs numbers make more sense. It’s one reason why we’re looking for a new set of eyes at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, because they keep revising things all over the place.” And “there is a more modern, online place called Homebase, which has the jobs number in August at 150,000.”
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
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