Thomas Barkin says unemployment rate is best job market measure

Richmond Federal Reserve Bank President Thomas Barkin has made his analytical priorities clear: when it comes to reading the US labor market, the unemployment rate is the signal, and almost everything else is noise. Speaking ahead of the June jobs report, Barkin said he would focus primarily on the unemployment rate as his preferred gauge of labor market health. His reasoning is straightforward. The metric has hovered in a tight band of 4.1% to 4.3% for roughly a year, a range he described as “pretty stable.” The ‘low-hire, low-fire’ economy Job growth has been tepid at best. Employers added just 50,000 jobs in December 2025, a figure that barely registers in a labor force of more than 160 million people. A November 2025 speech by Barkin noted that three-month average job growth had slowed to approximately 29,000. Barkin has characterized the current environment as a “low-hire, low-fire” situation. Companies aren’t laying people off in droves, but they’re also not exactly rolling out the welcome mat for new hires. By August 2025, the unemployment rate stood at a historically low 4.3%. It inched up to 4.6% by January 2026 before settling back into its narrow corridor. Why this matte...