MNI BRIEF: Fed's Goolsbee Taking Job Gains With Grain Of Salt
Chicago Fed President Austan Goolsbee said on Friday there is reason to think the government statistics showing the U.S. added 272,000 jobs last month were overstated and will likely be revised down in the future, adding that most other labor indicators are returning to "normal."
"I'm not taking as much signal from just the one big jobs number because most of the other scale-free -- like the unemployment rate, the quit rate, the ratio of vacancies to job openings -- all of those are cooling back to something that looks like normal even though the jobs number itself is bigger," he said in Q&A at a Iowa Farm Bureau economics event. (See: MNI INTERVIEW: Quarterly Fed Cuts To Start In Dec - Reinhart)
Goolsbee pointed to increased migration of 60,000 to 80,000 a month boosting monthly job gains and said benchmark revisions in a year will likely bring the job growth in May down.