Focus at Four: Texas A&M PERC Director on U.S. job report
BRYAN, Texas (KBTX) – The Federal Government reports the U.S. economy added a stunning 353-thousand jobs in January.
It’s a stronger-than-expected start to 2024.
Professor Dennis Jansen, Director of the Private Enterprise Research Center at Texas A&M University, joined First News at Four on Friday.
Jansen says that although the job market has grown, that does not mean the unemployment rate went down. In fact, he noted that it remained at 3.7%, but certain sectors are seeing growth.
“One is health services, they’re continuing to grow. Industries like leisure and hospitality continue to have positive growth. And actually, government employment growth was pretty slow over the first year or two after the pandemic, but it’s growing a little faster than the rest of the employment growth in the last in the last year,” he said.
Jansen also said some economists think the Fed is hesitant to cut interest rates because of inflation.
“I’m not quite sure that’s true, so we’ll see. But, it doesn’t say that the Fed’s going to quickly move on interest rates, but they may take small steps,” he said.
Jansen mentioned that inflation is, of course, an issue. It is something that goes back a long time, but these reports show that we seem to be recovering and holding fast.
“It’s hard to put the inflation genie back in the bottle, but we seem to have done it. But I think they’d like to make sure of that,” he said.
You can find out more about PERC here.
You can read the full job report here.
To watch the full interview, click the video player above.
