Trump Econ Chief Confronted by CNBC Anchor Over Tanking Jobs Report — Insists ‘The Economy Is Really Strong!’

Trump White House National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett insisted “the economy is really strong” after CNBC anchor Carl Quintanilla asked him about a February jobs report that showed unexpected losses and a sharp drop in the workforce on Friday.

Experts were expecting an increase of around 50,000 jobs ahead of the Employment Situation report for last month. But on Friday morning, the report showed 92,000 jobs lost and 69,000 more in downward revisions, and a workforce participation number that shocked CNBC anchor Rick Santelli.

On Friday morning’s edition of CNBC’s Squawk on the Street, Quintanilla remarked to co-host Jim Cramer that the workforce number “unwinds, like, several years worth of gains” and Cramer exclaimed “My kingdom for an asterisk!”

Several minutes later, Quintanilla asked Hassett about the report, and whether there are “enough asterisks, in Jim’s words, to make this number make more sense?”:

CNBC ANCHOR CARL QUINTANILLA: Are there enough asterisks, in Jim’s words, to make this number make more sense?

NATIONAL ECONOMIC COUNCIL DIRECTOR KEVIN HASSETT: Well, I think Jim’s right that there have been so many strong indicators this month that it’s something of a surprise.

But there’s some weather, there are strikes on the West Coast, and I think that we also have this birth-death model, the change in the procedure at the BLS.

And so I think what we need to start doing with these jobs numbers, at least on the payroll side, is take the average over a few months, and if you take the average over a few months we had a surprisingly positive one last month and a surprisingly negative one this one.

But on average. It’s about what we expect to be seeing because immigration has gone down by so much that break-even employment is probably in the sort of 30 or 40,000 jobs a month range.

And so, yeah, I think it’s consistent with everything else we’re seeing, which is that the economy is really strong!

With revisions, the average job growth for the past three months is 5,667 jobs created, with a total of 17,000 net jobs created.

Watch above via CNBC’s Squawk on the Street.

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