Chair of the Federal Reserve Janet Yellen is speaking at 1300ET (1700GMT) on Friday 22 May 2015
Adam has 5 questions for her (His 6th was 'How about a coffee sometime?' But he is a shy chap.)
Yellen's key focus is on the labor market, so I've put together a few comments from around the place on what is going on with US employment:
Goldman Sachs:
- "The structural unemployment rate has remained low at 5%; the cyclical gap in participation is very small" and is narrowing
BNP:
- Jobless claims "in line with a resilient labor market"
(ps. Ryan had the latest on these here ... check out the graph of the trend!)
TD:
- "With claims as a percentage of the labor force at record lows and unemployment zeroing in on the NAIRU, few on the FOMC would argue against the need to better balance policy and economic fundamentals. However, few if any embrace the notion of raising rates into weakening economic momentum."
Barclays:
- US labor market momentum remains solid in mid-May
MFR Inc chief US economist Joshua Shapiro:
- (trend in claims data) "remains consistent with a robust trend for monthly nonfarm payroll growth, and certainly one much stronger than has been reported for the past few months"
Moody's Analytics:
- "The labor market is doing well and continues to tighten. Still, the economy got off to a slow start this quarter. It seems it hasn't found a rhythm after the poor first three months of the year"
RDQ Economics:
- "With long-term unemployment on a downward trend, we would not be surprised to see the unemployment rate fall to 5.3 percent in May"
Sourced via Bloomberg, Reuters, MNI and more!
