MNI TRANSCRIPT: Powell on May Jobs Report, Racial Inequality

     WASHINGTON (MNI) - The following is the portion of a transcript from

Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell's press conference on Wednesday:

     Q: Two quick questions. One is if we have hit bottom for the economy? The

second question is regarding the way that the pandemic has exacerbated racial

inequality. I want to talk to what extent do you think you can factor in boast

disparities when you think about maximum...

     A: I would say many forecasters had been expecting a bottom for the economy

around the middle of the year with a huge range of uncertainty. I think the

labor market -- the evidence of one jobs report is that the lab market may have

hit bottom in may. We don't know that. We're going to see. Many forecasters

widely expect a recovery over the second half of the year. It's possible. The

thing is we're not going to overreact to a single data point. We're going to be

very careful about reaching any conclusions about good data or bad data. I think

wire going to be here supporting this economy as long as it's needed. I think

there's a possibility that the bottom has come in the labor market. We don't

know that yet. We'll know more as we go forward. So in terms of the effect

pandemic of inequality. The pandemic, of course, hits everybody, but in economic

sense it hits those industries that are -- that involve groups of people in

tight grew groups either in places with travel leisure, restaurant and bars,

those kinds of service economy jobs. A lot of the lost jobs were from people

that work in the service economy dealing with the public, for example, and

relatively compared to other jobs relatively low wages. If you just look at what

that is, unemployment has gone up more for Hispanics, more for African-Americans

and women have borne an extraordinary -- a notable share of the burden beyond

their percentage in the workforce. So that's really a really, really

unfortunate, because if you just go two months where we were was, we had the

first tight labor market in a [indiscernible]  quarter century. For the last

couple years before the pandemic hit wages went up for the most with people at

lower end of the sectors. [Indiscernible] many met with low and middle class

communities saying doesn't change this. This is the best lake market we've seen.

Keep it going. We had every reason to expect this would continue, and then this

comes. So it's heart-breaking. We want to get it back. We really want to get it

back. So I think we learned a number of things over the course of the last few

years. One of them is that -- you can have 3.5% unemployment for a couple years

and see modest moves in wages and relatively [indiscernible] in that that's not

the [indiscernible]  of the economy, I think. We can use our tools to support

the labor market and support the economy. We can use them until we do fully

recover, and that's what we're planning to do. You know, we don't target

different groups. Worry cognizant of the fact, though, that late in the last

circle, late in the last expansion the benefits really do go more to people at

the lower end of the wage spectrum for the first time in many years when labor

markets are tight and when unemployment is low. We would like to get back to

that and get back to that place.

--MNI Washington Bureau; +1 202 371 2121; email: ryan.hauser@marketnews.com

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