A CNN commentator admitted on air Friday that American’s wage increases have been mostly “eaten up by inflation.”
CNN commentator Catherine Rampell made the statement while discussing the jobs report that recorded 467,000 jobs added in January. The number exceeded the expected job gain of 125,000 jobs.
“The story of the past year has been we have seen these strong nominal wage gains, but they’ve been mostly eaten up by inflation. So, take that with a grain of salt,” Rampell said.
“This is just not what people were expecting,” CNN news anchor John Berman said of the jobs report. “The White House had been out earlier in the week bracing people for the possibility of jobs losses.”
Rampell emphasized that the pleasing jobs report may have occurred for a variety of reasons. “I’m going to have to dig into it a little more to figure out exactly how we got that fantastic number,” she said, adding, “I hope it’s for good reasons, and not just weird statistical noise.” (RELATED: Almost Half Of All Americans Say Inflation Caused Them Financial Hardship)
CNN anchor Christine Romans said that the job report meant that people were “upgrading their jobs.”
“So I think the story of the American job market, it isn’t layoffs…it is about a huge churn like we’ve never seen in this job market before,” Romans said. “Wages in this report up 5.7% year over year that’s a really important number I think.” (RELATED: Inflation Hits Highest Level in 39 Years)
NEW: Meanwhile, global economic problems continue to mount. New figures show prices in the US rose 7% in December compared to a year before.
Makes 2021 the worst for inflation for forty years (since 1982). pic.twitter.com/8zlOoEeuNS
— Lewis Goodall (@lewis_goodall) January 12, 2022
The Consumer Price Index rose to 7% in December.
The Biden administration responded to the bleak report in a statement, saying that, “this report underscores that we still have more work to do, with price increases still too high and squeezing family budgets.”