White House: We Might Want to See ‘Growth Rates that Are Below Trend’

On Wednesday’s broadcast of Bloomberg’s “Balance of Power,” White House Council of Economic Advisers Chair Jared Bernstein stated that the White House wants to see “growth rates, perhaps even growth rates that are below trend,” because having these growth rates would aid in “the realignment of supply and demand in the labor market.”

Bernstein said, [relevant remarks begin around 12:45] “Well, one of the things I thought I heard Chair Powell say today was something about housing prices expected to come down in the second half of the year. That’s something that we at the CEA have talked about, we’ve published on our blog and on our Twitter thread, a model that we use to track housing prices. And some of this is very mechanical. It’s just the way the lags work in the CPI and the PCE deflators. So, that rollover in the second half of this year should be helpful in terms of maybe nudging the core down a bit and helping with the headline as well. In terms of growth, look, I like — obviously, I think where we are is very consistent with the president’s transition to steady, stable growth. What we want to see are growth rates, perhaps even growth rates that are below trend, because the mechanics of that is it helps the realignment of supply and demand in the labor market. And with a strong consumer, with a labor market like this behind her, that’s the kind of numbers that we’ve been seeing.”

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