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Americans grew notably less sanguine about the job market in August and downgraded views of their current financial situations, a report from the New York Federal Reserve Bank showed on Monday.
The regional Fed bank’s Survey of Consumer Expectations for August also found essentially stable expectations for future price pressures.
The survey, conducted over the course of last month, flagged a sharp rise in respondents who said finding a new job would be harder if they became unemployed. The expected probability of finding new work in such an event among respondents was 44.9%, the lowest level in the survey since June 2013 and down from 50.7% in July.
Expectations that the unemployment rate will be higher in the future rose in August, as did expectations of future job loss, the probability of which stood at 14.5% of respondents, above the 12-month average of 14%. In August, survey respondents also said they marked down the probability of leaving a job voluntarily.
The troubled outlook for hiring is another sign of challenges in the job market. Government data released over the two months has shown a notable deceleration in the rate of job growth amid big downward revisions to previous months’ numbers.
Job Woes
On Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that non-farm payrolls rose by a modest 22,000 jobs after increasing by 75,000 in July. The unemployment rate ticked up slightly to 4.3%, which was itself a four-year high. The data also showed that in June the economy lost jobs, something that had not happened in four and a half years.
The worsening outlook for hiring is helping buttress the outlook for a Fed rate cut next week. The U.S. central bank is widely expected to lower its short-term benchmark interest rate by a quarter of a percentage point to the 4.00%-4.25% range at the end of its September 16-17 meeting.
Fed officials worry that President Donald Trump’s trade tariffs could further boost already stubborn levels of inflation. But they are also increasingly anxious that the job market is running into trouble, and that’s becoming the main focus of monetary policy.
“I’ve been clear that I think we should be cutting at the next meeting,” Fed Governor Christopher Waller said in an interview with CNBC last week. “You want to get ahead of having the labor market go down because usually when the labor market turns bad, it turns bad fast.”
The New York Fed survey also found respondents have downgraded their current financial situations, although it added that respondents’ “year-ahead expectations about households’ financial situations became more dispersed” in August.
Relative to July, “a larger share of households are expecting a worse financial situation, and an equally larger share of households are expecting a better financial situation in one year from now,” it said.
The survey, which is most closely watched for its findings on the expected path of inflation, found relative stability in August. The year-ahead expected level of inflation rose to 3.2% from 3.1% in July, while expectations for price pressures three and five years from now were unchanged at 3% and 2.9%, respectively.
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Stable inflation expectations data will likely be welcomed by Fed officials, as it signals a lower risk that the tariffs will drive a persistent increase in price pressures.
(Reporting by Michael S. Derby; Editing by Paul Simao)
