KOA Headlines
10 04 24 CSU Economics Professor Stephan Weiler talks about today's jobs report
If you put aside $0.25 every week for a year, what could you get at the end? A few cups of coffee, maybe? A candle? Or you could get a year of the best reporting from all over the world. Go to washingtonpost.com/bf24 right now. You'll get a Washington Post subscription for $0.25 a week for your first year. This is a Black Friday sale, so it won't last long. It's beginning to sound a lot like the holidays. The Roku Channel, your home for free and premium TV, is giving you access to holiday music and genre-based stations from iHeart all for free. Find the soundtrack of the season with channels like iHeartChristmas and North Pole Radio. The Roku Channel is available on all Roku devices, web, Amazon Fire TV, Google TV, Samsung TVs, and the Roku mobile app on iOS and Android devices. So stream what you love and turn up the cheer with iHeartRadio on the Roku Channel. Happy streaming! Deciding on what to listen to is hard. Using zoomo to stream music from iHeart90's radio is easy. Or play iHeart Country, or hip-hop beats. Your choice, all for free. Stream easy with zoomo play. Get live and on-demand entertainment with no logins, no sign-ups, no accounts, no hassle. This December, get cozy on the couch with Charlie's Angel starring Drew Barrymore, Lucy Liu, Cameron Diaz, and Looper starring Bruce Willis and Emily Blunt, all streaming free on zoomo play. Go to play.zumo.com now. Life is hard. Zumo is easy. Experts underestimating the nation's jobs numbers by over 100,000 new jobs, according to the latest Bureau of Labor and Statistics report, which shows 254,000 jobs were added in September. The unemployment rate ticking down to 4.1%, it represents a turnaround from jobs numbers that played a role in triggering rate cuts from the Fed last month, and on with this now on the KOA Common Spirit Health Hotline to share their perspective. It's Colorado State University economics professor Stephen Weiler. Professor, welcome back to Colorado's Morning News. Our business and money editor Pat Woodard is with us as well. More jobs always seems like a good thing. What is your takeaway from this latest data? They are jumping for joy at the Fed. You can say that for sure. And it's just a great number for Americans in general. 254,000 jobs, as you say, exceeded all expectations. They also revised July and August upward by 72,000 jobs. So the employment growth was broad across food and drink, health, government, construction, and broad base growth is the best. So what we can talk about, what it might do for the Fed, but in any case, this is good news for Americans. Well, let's do talk about what it means for the Fed. How does this factor into the Federal Reserve's interest rate cutting strategy if it factors in it all? It does. And the interesting thing is because of two unfortunate incidents, the longshoreman strike that's going on right now in the hurricane, it's going to be hard to dissect the October numbers as quite as clearly. And the Fed is going to meet at the beginning of November. So this is probably the last report that they're really going to look at closely. And I think that basically what this does is it says the economy is doing well. The soft landing seems right on schedule. And so also, I don't think that the Fed will feel at all a hurry to decrease interest rates. Dr. Sherman Powell talked about it was unlikely to have another 50 point basis point or 0.5% decrease in the federal funds rate. I think this is going to back him up. We're probably looking at two small 25 basis point interest rate increases in November and December. Professor Reiler, you talked about the longshoreman strike and how that could really just cause all the numbers going forward to just be on a spiral or really unclarity of what they could look like specifically. Do we have any expectations of how those could look going forward? Because while it was only a couple of days, it was a couple of days of complete gridlock. Complete gridlock, absolutely. No, it's significant and can ripple through the economy very much like the supply chain problem after the pandemic. It's going to be really hard to know. And that's part of the reason that this report, which is untainted by the strike as well as the hurricane, which damaged and killed a lot of folks in the on the East Coast and the Gulf. So this report, I think, is actually more important than it ever is. It's also in a report that sort of underlines the fact that there are sort of still sort of two economies. One that for most folks, it's going pretty well, a short term unemployment rate that less than five weeks went down, 322,000 people. But long term unemployment rates went up by 300,000 over the course of the last year. Discouraged workers, people who have been trying to find a job but couldn't and stopped looking increased by 21%. So what you've got here, I think, and this is something we may want to talk about over time, too, is that there are folks that are doing fine. But there is a strata of the population that is struggling that are having a hard time finding a job. And so I think that undercurrent it needs to be acknowledged. I wanted to ask about the piece, at least with that strike, from your vantage point, one of the other sticky issues that they haven't addressed is automation when it comes to this. Is that something that they should be worried about? Is this something that we need to worry about the automation piece or doesn't that make things more efficient and maybe less costly? I think you're going to get disagreement among folks, but I tend to take your second scenario that it actually does make things more efficient and that it actually raises wages for workers. And that was also another good news in this report. Those wages are up 4% year over year, which is a great number when you compare it to the inflation rate, which only went up 2.5%. So there's some real growth there. But the automation will lead to some unemployment, AI. We're all thinking about artificial intelligence that will probably have a factor, too, in terms of the supply chain. But in general, for the economy overall, jobs, the automation piece is something that is actually good and is likely to create actually new jobs in new and different areas. Financial markets generally seem to root for more interest rate cuts, and the jobs report could mean fewer of them, as we've talked about. Markets are up today, so does the overall health of the economy outweigh that wish for more rate cuts? I think that's a really good observation, Pat. Yes. I think that people were, I mean, a quarter of a million new jobs is a big deal, and I think they are rooting for bigger interest rate cuts, but they know some rate cuts are coming. And so they, I think they're going to probably end up being satisfied by that, and that's probably reflect what's reflected in the market this morning. CSU economics professor at Stephen Weiler, Professor Weiler, thanks for your insight as always. It's a pleasure, thank you. If you put aside 25 cents every week for a year, what could you get at the end? A few cups of coffee, maybe? A candle? Or you could get a year of the best reporting from all over the world. Go to washingtonpost.com/bf24 right now. You'll get a Washington Post subscription for 25 cents a week for your first year. This is a Black Friday sale, so it won't last long. Washington Post.com/bf24. It's beginning to sound a lot like the holidays. The Roku Channel, your home for free and premium TV, is giving you access to holiday music and genre-based stations from iHeart all for free. Find the soundtrack of the season with channels like iHeartChristmas and North Pole Radio. The Roku Channel is available on all Roku devices, web, Amazon Fire TV, Google TV, Samsung TVs, and the Roku mobile app on iOS and Android devices. So stream what you love and turn up the cheer with iHeartRadio on the Roku Channel. Happy streaming! Deciding on what to listen to is hard. Using Zuma to stream music from iHeart90's radio is easy, or play iHeart Country or Hip Hop Beats. Your choice, all for free. Stream easy with Zuma Play. Get live and on-demand entertainment with no logins, no sign-ups, no accounts, no hassle. This December, get cozy on the couch with Charlie's Angel starring Drew Barrymore of Lucy Lou, Cameron Diaz, and Looper starring Bruce Willis and Emily Blunt, all streaming free on Zuma Play. Go to play.zuma.com now. Life is hard. Zuma was easy.