The Daily Rundown   |  December 07, 2012

Economy takes an upturn

Moody Analytics’ Mark Zandi talks about the addition of 146,000 jobs in November and the dropping unemployment numbers.

Share This:

This content comes from Closed Captioning that was broadcast along with this program.

>> make of these numbers and does the november report provide us a real sense of where this recovery is right now? let's bring in the man we like to bring in every month, the chief economist for moody's analytics. mark, i have to start with this sandy impact. the labor department specifically put out a statement saying our survey response rates and the affects ee eed states. it did not affect estimates for november. do you believe that?

>> i'm skeptical. i mean, new yorkers worked really hard and got it together gracefully given the circumstances. i suspect when we get all the data in and we get more responses to the survey that we'll get a revision down in the data but, chuck, bottom line, it feels like the job market is holding firm in the face of sandy, in the face of fiscal cliff concerns, so that's good news.

>> so if you look at one of the things that struck us obviously the one negative number is construction, doeses that bounce back in a way that's maybe overdone because of what ends up being a sandy effect to the positive?

>> yeah. so i suspect the construction employment numbers will get if not revised up, we'll see much stronger numbers going forward. just simply because of the reconstruction related to the storm. my guess is some of those big retail employment gains you referred to, those where we'll see some downward revisions in the data where we'll see some weakness. leisure and hospitality type jobs would be affected by the storm and i'm not sure anyone else is picking that up.

>> a year ago 8.7%. now 7.7% a. year from now are we going to be below 7%?

>> you know, i don't think so. it's very surprising we dropped a whole point in a year given the economy's growth race. we're going 2%, 2.5%. a year ago i never thought we'd drop a full point in unemployment. my guess is a year from now we'll be 7.5% but one of the key reasons why is we'll get more job growth after we address the fiscal issues. i'm hopeful the labor force will pick up. we'll see more people coming in because there will be more job opportunities 6789.

>>> mark, thank you. the white