Commentary
Everybody loves to see egg all over the faces of experts, but the blowout of the Wall Street consensus forecasting 190,000 new jobs for January by an actual number of 517,000 was more yolk than anyone bargained for. The favored media meme is that unemployment, which was supposed to go up, is instead at 3.4 percent, now at its lowest since before man landed on the moon.
With nothing to compare the strange era of post-COVID lockdowns to, the second guessing is everywhere. Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, having just happily reduced the velocity of the Fed’s interest rate tightening in its fight against the highest inflation in several decades, and even boasting of achieving “disinflation in the goods sector,” may have to resume increases by 50 basis points or more instead of the Fed’s latest 25 basis-point hike, its smallest since March 2021….