Biden sees economy avoiding recession, but risks remain

economy is chugging along in the holiday season, but the very strength of a new jobs report showed that high inflation remains a recession threat.

At the White House, the president signed an emergency bill to avert a rail strike that he said could have caused 765,000 job losses in two weeks and plunged the country into a painful downturn.

He suggested that the major recession risk was the freight rail strike, a problem the country avoided by having Congress impose an agreement that raises pay but fails to provide the additional paid sick leave that workers demanded.

But inflation can be a game of whack-a-mole, and Friday’s employment report suggested that wage growth actually could be part of the problem.

That comment caused the stock market to rise, only for the optimism to fizzle out on Friday as the new and revised wage data indicated the Fed might need to do more to cool the economy.

Members of four of the 12 unions involved had rejected the proposed contract as lacking sufficient paid sick leave, setting up the possibility of a strike beginning Dec.

“I’ve supported paid sick leave for a long time,” said the president, a staunch labor union supporter.

He said that Republican lawmakers blocked the inclusion of seven days of paid sick leave in the agreement, and it’s unclear how he would get backing for expanding family leave to all workers with the GOP winning the House majority in November’s elections.

Although Biden has said the economy is heading in the right direction, the employment report indicates that it’s on a “more muddled path” in which it’s unclear whether a downturn and eventual job losses can be averted, said Daniel Zhao, lead economist at Glassdoor, an employment website.