Philadelphia Fed President Patrick Harker said in a speech that US economy is “by and large” in good shape overall. GDP has come “roaring back”, consumption, housing, and manufacturing are “extremely healthy”, while workers’ incomes are rising.
However, “even as GDP has almost entirely recouped its losses from last year, employment remains down significantly,” he added. “We still have nearly 7.6 million fewer people working than we did before the pandemic. And if you assume we would have maintained our prepandemic job growth of around 200,000 jobs a month had COVID-19 never arrived, we’re really down around 10.6 million jobs.”
