Austan Goolsbee, former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Obama, joins “Viewpoint” host Eliot Spitzer to analyze the Labor Department’s employment figures for July — the country gained 163,000 jobs, which was better than many had forecast, but the unemployment rate rose from 8.2 to 8.3 percent.
Goolsbee, an economics professor at the University of Chicago, cautions, “You never should take one month’s numbers as meaning anything because it’s highly variable.”
He sees some signs of growth in the figures, but notes there’s a long way to go. “Everything you can do to transition the economy away from bubble-based growth, which is what we had — consumer spending and housing construction, which was not sustainable — and shift it to manufacturing, exports, investment-led growth — which we can sustain — that’s what [we've] got to do. But that takes time.”
