Joelle Gamble Explains the Confusing State of the US Labor Market

08/29/22 • 44 min

2 Listeners

The unemployment rate is down to 3.5%, which is far lower than just about anyone thought it would be a year ago. So that's great. On the other hand, measures of labor force participation are below where they were pre-crisis. So the question is whether there's been some fundamental shift in the composition of the labor market vs. the pre-pandemic era, or whether we're still in the process of normalization. To dive into this more, we spoke to Joelle Gamble, Chief Economist at the US Department of Labor. Among other things, we discuss the narrowing gap between black and white unemployment and whether this progress can be sustained throughout the cycle.

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Odd Lots - Joelle Gamble Explains the Confusing State of the US Labor Market

Transcript

Speaker 100:00:10.118

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Joe Wisnal and I'm Tracy. Tracy. I'm gonna say something and I don't think it's particularly sort of controversial, but this is my assessment. No, no, no, this is my basic assessment of where we are, like big picture, like you know, over two years since the start of the pandemic, which is that the labor market has recovered far faster than anyone would have expected in March and A