Austan Goolsbee

But I bring up that example not to say that's what I look at, but to say there are many private sector sources that aren't as good, no one of them is near as good as the official BLS statistics.

But...

We at the Chicago Fed have put together our labor market indicators where we go look at, I think, 14 different, some private sector, some public sector measures of the job market and make a real-time prediction what will be the next unemployment rate when it comes out.

And it's proved pretty prescient, and it gives us an early read on what the labor market conditions are.

And it was particularly useful when the government shut down and there were no unemployment statistics.

So then it was like, hey, we're the only ones with an unemployment.

Here's what the unemployment rate would have been.

And we also have a hiring rate and a

and a layoff and separations rate.

So I like the Chicago Fed labor market indicators on that side.

And it's important to add what I don't like at this moment is what in normal times is the single greatest labor market statistic, which is how many jobs were created last month.

But when immigration's got question marks, labor supply's got question marks, the number of jobs created in the month is no longer a very good measure of the business cycle.

On the price side, I think it's harder to track.

We got better private sector measures of the job market than we do of inflation.

I only ever aspired to be a data dog.

I didn't want to be.

They asked me, are you a dove?

Are you a hawk?

I don't need to be a bird of any kind.

I just want to be a dog and sniff over here.