Lacking still: US jobs market yet to recover, says Yellen

Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen urges US monetary policy to focus on what data says

WASHINGTON: Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen rebuffed pressure from inflation hawks to move faster toward a rate hike, saying the US jobs market still shows slack despite recent gains. In her much-awaited speech on the labour market, Yellen said US monetary policy needed to be pragmatic, focused on what a range of data says. She acknowledged the rising calls for preemptive action to head off inflation, including from a growing minority within the Fed. She admitted that interpreting the data on the US labour market has become more complex, difficult to determine which patterns are cyclical and which represent deep structural and societal  changes. “The assessment of labour market slack is rarely simple and has been especially challenging recently,” she told a symposium. Still, she stressed that even if the unemployment rate has fallen more quickly than expected to 6.2 %, there remains “considerable uncertainty about the level of employment.”

Published in The Express Tribune, August 24^th, 2014.

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