Today's jobs report not only showed the pace of hiring slowed slightly in January, adding

143,000 jobs, it also revised down jobs numbers between April of 2023 and March of 2024

by nearly 600,000, the largest annual revision in 15 years. To help us make sense of all of this, we're joined now by

Austin Gouldsby, President and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. Austin, welcome back

to the News Hour. Good to see you. Yeah, thank you for having me. So let's start with today's

number, shall be 143,000 jobs added a bit lower than expected. We also saw unemployment ticked down to 4%. Wages also rose 4.1% from the prior year.

What do all these numbers put together say to you about where we are?

Yeah, there's a lot of numbers and you always want to be careful over indexing on one month.

Remember that the payroll jobs created number is plus or minus around

100,000. So it was 150,000 plus or minus 100,000. I think most measures of the job market

have been pretty solid and they're largely saying the economy's kind of settled in at something

like full employment. Always in January you have these big revisions and this was the biggest

revision in some time looking back on the previous year. But we've had a lot of variability.

Just the last month's number got revised way up.

So we're just going to have to look for the through line and not overreact to any one month.

And that big revision down, though, there's some technical reasons here as well.

But does it overall in any way say to you that maybe the economy has actually been growing much more slowly than

we'd previously thought?

I don't think so, because, as I say, we have a lot of measures of the job market, the unemployment

rate, the number of jobs.

We can look at the ratio of how many job vacancies there are to how many unemployed workers

there are.

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