The time a president strong-armed a Federal Reserve Chairman.

I'm David Brancaccio from Los Angeles today.

First news just now that hiring was weaker than expected

and the month just ended. The headline is that

payrolls grew by 142,000 people in August, but there's more economist Julia

Coronado, founder of macro policy perspectives, joins us from Austin. Hey August

Julia the month before July also got revised down a lot. That's right we have

downward revisions to prior months and weaker than expected bounce back. So hiring is definitely slowing.

Talking weak using number of names on payrolls, but got to say the unemployment rate went down slightly today.

It did tick down, but it jumped up in July, so that was expected.

It is a lot higher at 4.2% than at the start of the year when we were

at 3.7% so another sign of a cooling labor market.

So cooling but not terrible, but does this sign of weakness mean that you think interest

rates might go down a quarter of a percentage point, week after next or maybe even a half?

This is really a judgment call for Fed officials and we'll hear from a couple of them this morning.

Definitely rates are going down.

They're going to be cutting rates through the fall. The question is how quickly and there is an

argument to be made for starting fast, but again we'll hear from the Fed officials who make those decisions

shortly.

All right, so you're saying there's a chance of half a percent.

Economist Julia Coronado also teaches at the University of Texas Austin.

Thank you. Oh, Hi, this is Emily from Paxton, Nebraska. I live in a rural area where the

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