白宫经济顾问委员会主席：强劲就业数据印证政策有效

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Well, let's see how bonds are moving following the jobs print. I mean, it's basically the curve is doing what you would expect. It is flattening at the short end. We're seeing 2 years and 5year note yields higher on the day. the 10-year and the 30-year are a little bit lower as maybe there's more credibility in the idea of the Fed raising rates and uh in the long run tamping down inflation and the dollar is moving higher which is what you would expect if markets are thinking that maybe we're going to see the Fed raise rates.

Now, we have heard uh just a moment ago from President Trump about the jobs report. No surprise that he is happy with the total number of jobs created, the 162,000. But he goes on to tell the Fed what to do, saying the Fed board with its great new leader must get smart, be patriots for a change. High interest rates put the USA at a very unfair disadvantage, and I won't allow that to happen. Joining us now, White House Council of Economic Advisors, Chair Chris Failen.

It's your first uh chance to be on with us, and we're very glad to see you. And um what does he mean by I won't allow that to happen?

I can't speak for the president. What I can say is this is a blowout jobs report. Uh right now uh the consensus among this network's Bloomberg economist was 55,000. This came in higher not only than the average of those but also every single one of them all 77. Uh it's a sign that the administration's policies are working. Uh we have a very healthy job market. Not just this month, this year we've added 80,000 jobs a month.

Uh in order to keep unemployment from going up, we estimate you need to average about 40,000 a month. We're doubling that. Uh unemployment's fallen from 4.3 to 4.1%. Uh average weekly earnings are up 3.7%. This is a strong labor market.

It definitely is a strong labor market and a blowout report. Chris, some of the categories we saw gain were local government, leisure and hospitality and also information services. Is the Trump administration having a real effect in getting employment in these categories or is the job to largely stay out of the way? Every time any statistic comes out, it's going to be an average of a whole bunch of various sectors.

Uh I think the important thing is the Trump administration has specifically said they want manufacturing to come back to the United States. There were two specific policies that they did to do this. One was the OBB which had full expensing of capital expenditures. Capital expenditures now are on track to be almost double in 2026 what they were in 2024. The other was tariffs. We are saying to companies either pay a tariff, somebody pays the tariff or produce it in the United States.

And we are seeing a good fraction of them saying, "Okay, we'll make it in the United States." The manufacturing boom, the non-resident residential construction boom is real and it's showing up in the data. It's showing up in the data for capital expenditures. It's showing up in the jobs data.

Is it showing up too late for the midterms? And here's what I mean by that. You were talking about earnings. Average hourly earnings are running below the level of inflation right now. 3.1% uh this uh August and inflation at 3.4 4 for CPI, 3.7 for PCE, and you got gasoline at $4.15. It keeps going up. Uh, your focus has been on how many jobs were created, but Americans seem to be focusing on their earnings and the cost of living.

So I specifically talked about a average weekly earnings not hourly because what matters to people is what they bring home at the end of the week which is a com which is a combination of hourly earnings and how many hours you get to work. Part of the booming economy that we're having in the labor market that was shown up in this month is not just showing up in wages but showing up in hours which are when you when you combine hours and wages average weekly earnings are outstripping inflation.

Going back to McKe's point Mike McKe um diesel from the pump hit its highest ever level at around two $4 a gallon and the president has called the affordability issue a democratic hoax. Is that how the CA sees it as well? Is this a a concern to you to bring those numbers down?

It's affordability is always been a focus of this administration. It matters to us. We're doing specific things to make things more affordable for the American people. I think part of it is beef prices. Specific actions to bring beef prices down. temporarily allowing some South American beef to come in, but also specific actions, for instance, to increase the shockingly low herd size uh in the United States. And then to make it easier for ranchers to bring their cattle directly to the market as opposed to going through which is essentially a small number of middlemen to process it.

This administration again looks at specific problems and tries to find ways to ameliate them. Uh, forgive me for asking a question this way, but um, the president says that when the economy is booming, we should be uh, lowering interest rates, which would seem to be counter to what uh, conventional economics would call for. He also says that he's going to stop trading with countries that have a trade surplus with the US if the Fed doesn't uh, cut rates.

And I'm I'm wondering, should Americans just You can't speak for the president, you say, but should Americans just kind of ignore what he's saying when uh his advice or his comments on the economy don't make a lot of sense?

Well, let's get back to what what the the business about whether you should cut or raise rates when the economy does well. Chairman Worsh was very specific in his Jackson Hole speech to say that what he looks at to decide whether to increase or decrease rates is how inflation is doing, where it is, where it's been trending and that he pretty much specifically ruled out that things like the labor market are going to determine whether or not or what interest rate decisions should be.

We also get CPI and PPI next week. How are you reading or um awaiting those figures? I mean it we're now seeing more importance than them especially after the blowout jobs report today.

Absolutely. What matters is uh inflation. Uh we'll be looking very closely at those numbers and we are going to be awaiting them as is everyone else.

Do you have any kind of uh thoughts on what we might see because uh what the hawks on the Fed are talking about is service industry prices. The Fed is kind of looking through oil and gasoline inflation and their view is sort of the tariffs have already passed through the inflation numbers. Do you see progress being made in broader areas of the economy? So I don't see any of the data before you know next week. Uh so I can't I can't speak to that.

It is the case that we a lot of times economists get a a bum wrap for looking at core inflation as if uh food and energy don't matter. We know that food and energy matters but we also know that they tend to be volatile. Uh and so if you want to predict what's going to happen in the future, we look at core which excludes food and energy because it helps predict wealth. Core PCE over the last 3 months annualized is 3%. core PCE for the 3 months before that was 3.9%.

It's coming down. So, personally, I don't tell the Fed what to do, but personally, I don't see the justification for raising rates at this point.

And real wages, they made solid growth, but the underlying costs for consumers like you and me are still very high. Again, we bring it back to what Mike McKe pointed out earlier that the price of the pump is still around $4 a barrel. Does the president or your office have tools to bring down those prices before we see further spikes?

Right now, I mean, we can look at what causes all aspects of uh gasoline prices, prices of crude, uh prices of refinering, refining and so forth. Uh what I can say is there is data on what people expect, wh