
When the city shut down all nonessential businesses, he was laid off. Merchan was a server at the Progress, a bustling San Francisco restaurant. The Congressional Budget Office “thought we wouldn’t be here until 2024,” he said, “and here we are in 2021.”Īlejandro Merchan, 37, is among the workers who have been able to bounce back. “It took us nine years to get the unemployment rate down this low after the last economic downturn,” said Jared Bernstein, a member of the White House Council of Economic Advisers. The president and his advisers sought to spotlight the sunnier indicators provided by the household survey.

There was a big increase in participation among Hispanic men and women, who were among the hardest hit by the pandemic. So the recent pattern suggests that the household survey had been undercounting employment and, in effect, caught up in November. It showed overall employment, for example, growing by 1.1 million, seasonally adjusted.Įconomists generally put more trust in the employer survey, which has a much larger sample size.

“Our economy is markedly stronger than it was a year ago,” he declared. On Friday, he hailed the drop in the unemployment rate as a vindication of his administration’s policies - while acknowledging the mixed signals in the jobs report. Biden has been forced to concede that many Americans do not feel that improvement and have grown more pessimistic about the economy and his handling of it. And the Biden administration is eager to point to an accelerating recovery as a validation of its policies - including the $1.9 trillion stimulus package signed in March, the American Rescue Plan.īut Mr. With inflation surging to its highest rate in decades, Federal Reserve officials are weighing whether to step up efforts to rein in prices.
