Delays and price hikes are anticipated in the US for holiday merchandise, a US Federal Reserve official said on Sunday, calling for more to be done to boost the workforce.
“We see consumers trying to get out early and spend their money to get their goods before they run out,” Mary Daly, head of the San Francisco branch of the US central bank, told CBS.
When shopping for the upcoming holidays, “people are buying it now and they’re being told oftentimes they can’t get it until after the holiday has passed,” she said.
Photo: Reuters
“So there are going to be delays,” as well as “some pressure on holiday item prices,” Daly said.
To address this, it will be necessary to “get more supply to the labor market, to the goods market,” she added.
In other words, to speed up the flow and production of goods, workers who have left the labor market because of the COVID-19 pandemic, and cannot return due to constraints such as childcare or health concerns, must be enabled to return to work.
The US labor market, which showed a strong rebound in June and July, adding more than one million jobs in each month, slowed in August and last month.
“It is a volatile period we’re in right now, COVID-19 is not behind us, so I don’t expect the job market to just be continuous,” Daly said.
“It is going to have these ups and downs, especially with the Delta variant,” she added, referring to the variant of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that has led to an increase in cases.
The Fed has said it wants to start tapering its asset purchases, which supported the US during the pandemic, but it wants to see progress in the labor market before announcing the exact timing.
However, most economists believe that last month’s disappointing creation of only 194,000 jobs should not be an obstacle to an announcement about tapering at the central bank’s next meeting next month.
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