RSM’s chief economist Joe Brusuelas takes umbrage with the characterization of the US labor market as weak. He tells Yahoo Finance’s Jared Blikre why he sees the market as “remarkably resilient.” See the full interview on, “Stocks in Translation.”

This post was written by Jimi Corpuz

Video Transcript

I would take question with your characterization of the labor market is weak.It's anything but weak.You know, we really, what we really want to see is the sustained pace of, of labor gains each month of around 100 and 50 to 200,000.That's really the sweet spot.We would need to drop much lower to even call anything weak, right?The unemployment rate went from, I think 3.323 to 3.863.I mean, it just, it didn't really move, but we allocated it up to 3.9.So, all right, the labor market remains remarkably resilient.The reason why you had 175 as opposed to the 240 is state government hiring slowed for at least the month.But we'll see that whether that was one month or just a deviation from the underlying trend.It's a matter of fact, during the month of April, the diffusion index, one month diffusion index, we saw a broader scope of hiring across the economy than we saw during the previous month when we had the 315,000 added.So I think the labor market is doing pretty good.Now, we've got broad demographic changes occurring deep into the economy.Secular trend changes.Yeah, I mean, it, the people are retiring, we need to devote more labor to health care and that's what you are seeing.There's a corner of the market that, well, let's just say it's moving on its own pattern for its own agenda that will characterize any gains in health care as weak.Now, that, that's simply not the case.