Fed's Barkin: Lack of job growth is the real concern

Federal Reserve (Fed) Bank of Richmond President Thomas Barkin noted on Thursday that the key thing to watch moving forward will be jobs figures, softly suggesting that equity markets may have overreacted to recent soft data.

Key highlights

Most hurricanes and tropical storms don't affect the macroeconomy.

What I hear from folks on the ground in the labor market is people are cutting back on hiring, but not firing.

No hiring, no firing, that's what we see in the data, and from here it could go either way.

The math of that suggests the unemployment rate goes up.

What would make you more worried is if job growth started to disappear.

For me, the case for lowering in July would have been either absolute conviction that the labor market was on the precipice, or if you thought you had inflation under control.

The equity markets don't feel like there's a big cataclysmic event that just happened.

The financial markets are looking not just at the modal outlook but also at the tails.

The US may be heading into a long-term worker shortage.