Chapter 1: What recent trends are affecting the U.S. job market?
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Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts. Radio. News. Hey, we talked about the market, the U.S. jobs market earlier with Michael McKee. It's sluggish, not rapidly deteriorating. And we did see that data that came out, saw traders refraining from boosting bets on near-term Fed rate cuts, setting stocks lower and bonds wavering.
So we're not, you know, it's not like all of a sudden traders are saying, okay, we're going to get more rate cuts because of that labor data we got this morning. Yeah, a reduction is fully priced in by mid next year. We should know, but we're not seeing those bets go up. No, exactly. I'm curious to see what our next guest has to say specifically about the U.S. labor market.
Let's head to the Bloomberg News Bureau in D.C. to someone well-known to our Bloomberg audience. She was formerly chief economist over at ZipRecruiter. She is Julia Pollack, and she's chief economist for the U.S. Department of Labor. Julia, good to have you back here on Bloomberg. How worried are you about rising unemployment?
I'm not. So this report overstates, understates the strength of the labor market right now because there are two huge temporary distortions at play in the data here. The first is 100,000 or more federal workers who took the fork and came off payrolls, and some of them have gone into temporary frictional unemployment situations.
And the second big distortion in this report is the Schumer shutdown, which forced 900,000 federal workers off the job. But it also led to weakness in the private sector because it forced work stoppages for federal contractors and led to temporary layoffs there. So I expect the unemployment rate to jump back down very soon.
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Chapter 2: How do temporary distortions impact the unemployment data?
I have no idea. You'd have to ask the president that.
If you were asked, would you serve as that?
Well, I think there is tremendous amount of work to do there, tracking AI's labor impact, improving the timeliness, the granularity, the accuracy of the data. And I have, at the Labor Department, made it my priority to push forward a very aggressive labor market data modernization agenda that puts workers and learners first and gives them more access to the data collected on them.
So, right now, I love partnering with the BLS on all of those kinds of initiatives, and I am happy to serve in whatever role the president sees fit.
If we're thinking, just 30 seconds, but if we're thinking about previous commissioners, how will this nominee or this next commissioner be different? Just 20 seconds.
I have no idea, but I think that whoever comes in has a very clear mandate from the president to put workers and learners at the center of what we do, to change the data paradigm to a real-time data paradigm, and to make sure that the data is accurate and has the utmost integrity.
All right, Julia. Thank you so much. Julia Pollack, chief economist for the U.S. Department of Labor. The forces shaping markets and the economy are often hiding behind a blur of numbers. So that's why we created The Big Take from Bloomberg Podcasts, to give you the context you need to make sense of it all. Every day in just 15 minutes, we dive into one global business story that matters.
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