Rachel Barber

speaker

271 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 21 Aug

Rachel Barber’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

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The Excerpt · America’s workforce is shrinking. What’s going on? · 22 Jul 2026 podcast

So we saw gas prices go down.

Now, with renewed hostilities, we're seeing gas prices go back up.

In the next jobs report, we should obviously look at the headline number just to see, is it going to be higher than $57,000?

Is it going to be well over $100,000 again?

Are we going to get back to that?

In general, where is the hiring?

Hiring has been heavily concentrated in sectors like healthcare, social assistance, private education over the last year or so, and we want to see it broaden out into other sectors.

We've seen that a bit over the last couple of months, but we'd like to see that continue just for a healthy labor market.

That's a good sign.

And then I think in general, I think the BLS would tell you not to trust just one month's report.

Every month the jobs report comes out, they include revisions for the prior two months.

So yes, we have to wait to see what the revisions tell us.

But at the same time, the BLS jobs report is still the gold standard for

labor market information.

It's what the Federal Reserve relies on and what economists look to to sort of get a gauge.

It is a very difficult task to measure every single month how many people left the workforce, how many people were hired in each industry.

They use different surveys to come up with these numbers.

And

Those surveys have had lagging participation rates over the last couple of years.

They still rely on phone calls.

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