“The recovery continues to show strong momentum,” said John Williams, outside the New York Economic Club, stressing that we will have to be patient.
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The full recovery of the US economy “will take time,” warned the president of the New York branch of the US central bank on Monday, stressing that the impact of the Delta variant is visible in economic indicators.
“The recovery continues to show strong momentum,” said John Williams, outside the New York Economic Club, stressing that we will have to be patient.
“Even with the strong pace of growth that we have seen much of this year, a full recovery will take time,” he said, noting in particular that the resurgence of Covid-19 cases “is affecting spending consumption and employment, maintains bottlenecks in sectors such as automotive and delays the full reopening of the service sector ”.
On the labor market front, “we are still far from having achieved the Federal Reserve’s (Fed) goal of full employment”, he added, recalling that there are 5 million jobs. today compared to the pre-pandemic level.
The unemployment rate for September will be released on October 8.
In August, it stood at 5.2%, still far from the historic low (3.5%) of February 2020 before the spread of the Covid.
Mr Williams finally stressed that there was still “great uncertainty” about the outlook for inflation.
On September 8, he already noted that despite “substantial progress” on the employment and inflation front, the objectives set by the US central bank had not yet been achieved.
Last week, the Fed lowered its growth forecast for this year to 5.9% from an estimated 7% in June. It also revised up the unemployment rate to 4.8% (+0.3 point).
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