Summers: ‘Not Much Evidence of Inflation Restraint’ in Unsustainable Jobs Numbers

During an interview aired on Friday’s broadcast of Bloomberg’s “Wall Street Week,” Harvard Professor, economist, Director of the National Economic Council under President Barack Obama, and Treasury Secretary under President Bill Clinton Larry Summers stated that while he views the October jobs report as strong and demonstrating a “robust” economy, the rate of job growth is not sustainable and there is “not much evidence of inflation restraint” demonstrated by the report.

Host David Westin asked, “We had a lot of economic news this week. We had jobs numbers and we had Fed results, of course. Let’s start with the jobs numbers, because they came in, I think, at least relatively strong. How did you interpret them?”

Summers responded, “I saw it the same way. Look, the population only grows by about 50,000 adults a month. So, any time you have 250,000 jobs, you’re growing at a rate that you’re not going to be ultimately able to sustain. It shows that, still, the economy is looking quite strong, no recession soon. You saw wages tick up. So, the good news is, economy looking robust. The bad news is, not much evidence of inflation restraint yet in train.”

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