Diane Swonk

Well, I think one of the questions that hasn't been asked of the Fed is we've heard the Fed talk about curbs on immigration and its effect on the break evens on unemployment and the labor market.

More broadly, we have not heard anything about the pockets of labor shortages that are beginning to creep up.

The quit rate in leisure and hospitality absolutely soared in November and over the summer.

And that is because of curbs in immigration.

We know that foreign-born and native-born workers in some professions, most notably in the service sector, are complements, not substitutes for each other.

And that's something that we're watching closely as well.

And even with the productivity growth we've seen, the AI boom that's going on is currently with that productivity growth, not derailed inflation.

And in fact, it is adding to inflation on the margin for insalient prices for many consumers, notably electricity costs.

And then you have this cold spell on top of it that added to natural gas costs.

But all of that is still pushing up prices rather than down.

We're going to get a lot of fiscal stimulus in the beginning of the year as well.

Well, first of all, the overall unemployment rate is not really a good summary statistic right now.

We know at the end of the year, those having to accept part time instead of full time hit an all time high.

We're now at the place where in the new millennium.

For the last 25 years, we've seen instead of multiple job holders falling as an expansion goes longer, they're now rising.

This is part of that labor share of income being eroded, the inequalities we're seeing out there.

And the frozen state of the labor market where those who have a job are clinging on and those who do not have a job are left wanting, I think is very important to understand.

When you think about things like the U6 measure of unemployment, which gets into that sort of under the hood, that's running around 8.4 percent, 2.2 percent above where it was in 2019.

And I think those are important issues.

Well, it's a difficult thing to do.