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How the Fed goes beyond the data to try to make the economy work for everyone

Workers’ views provide a more holistic view of how people feel about the economy and thus add important nuance to monetary policy discussions. A recent partnership between SkillUp and the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta helped the Fed better understand worker sentiment, confidence, and helped glean valuable insights. This blog post, written by Dr. Raphael Bostic highlights the importance of gathering information like this from workers and employers.

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The nation’s always-fluid labor market has been especially unpredictable since the COVID-19 pandemic.

To recap: The economy lost 22 million jobs in early 2020, essentially wiping out the post-Great Recession labor market recovery in two months. A year later, circumstances completely reversed, as employers scrambled to find workers to fill record numbers of openings as population growth slowed and retirements surged.

Today, the labor market is broadly healthy. Unemployment remains near all-time lows, monthly job growth is robust, labor force participation among prime-age (25- to 54-year-old) workers is above prepandemic levels, and wage increases have outpaced inflation for many months.

That’s the big picture. But as monetary policymakers at the Federal Reserve, we must fill in the details. If the pandemic taught me nothing else, it demonstrated that what we think we know can change almost overnight.