Fed will be happy with jobs report which showed cooling in employment, says IBM's Cohn

Joining us now, IBM Vice Chair, former Director of the National Economic Council and former Goldman Sachs President Gary Cohn. Welcome back. Thanks for having me. Great day to have you. Perfect day to have me. So do you, do you rejoice with the markets over today’s jobs report? Look, I think it’s a very good number for today. It’s just one number. And I I remind this and we’ve had this discussion here, It’s one number. One number is a point. If we get a second number, we’ll have a line. If we get 3 numbers, we’ll get a trend. So we need to get 3 numbers in the right direction to get a trend. And also these numbers are not science, they’re art form. These numbers are subject to revision. We’ve talked about revisions a lot. The market hangs a lot on these numbers, and these are numbers they revised and sometimes get wildly revised. We saw revisions down from last month. This number seems pretty consistent though with what we’re seeing in the JOLTS data and other data around. And this is a number that’s pleasing to those of us that sort of hang out in the markets. You know the Fed will be happy with this number. It shows a cooling, it shows their their interest rates having effect. Market practitioners and people that trade the market feel like this is a good market because it puts the Fed back where they want to be. It puts them on a trend towards lower interest rates and we’re seeing as you said, we’re seeing wages come down but wages have now sort of equalized with inflation. So we’re not seeing a loot, a loss of purchasing power, but we’re not seeing a gain of purchasing power. So it’s sort of lands in a good spot for now. Does it give you confidence that the inflation numbers will start to come in worse than expected, which is something the Fed needs to see? Look, Sir, it’s a number. It’s a start. Hopefully this is a start of a new trend. There’s a start of a trend of sort of tackling that last mile that we’ve talked about, you know, getting inflation down from 9 to 4% of 3.8%. That was relatively easy. Getting inflation down from 3.8 to 2 and two and below 2, that’s difficult. There’s some inherent factors in the system that are difficult to deal with. I’ve talked about those. You know, we saw 22 states increase minimum wages this year. Minimum wage is filtered through the system, not directly the minimum wage themselves, but they put pressure on the whole stack. So every job as you’re trying to hire someone who may have to pay more because the incremental marginal cost of Labor goes up. So we’ve seen the cost of Labor go up. That’s starting to, you know, equalize in the economy because. Some of those wage wage increases came through January 1st. We’re now far enough into the year where we’re seeing that.