Federal Reserve can’t reduce high black unemployment: Janet Yellen
The head of the US Federal Reserve, Janet Yellen, has told Congress that the central bank’s concerns about inflation limit its ability to address the high unemployment rate among African-Americans.
“So, there really isn’t anything directly the Federal Reserve can do to affect the structure of unemployment across groups,” Yellen told members of the House of Representatives in a hearing on Wednesday.
“And unfortunately, it’s long been the case that African-American unemployment rates tend to be higher than those on average in the nation as a whole,” she said during the House Financial Services Committee’s semiannual hearing on Federal Reserve policy.
The unemployment rate for African-Americans was 9.5 percent in June, nearly twice the rate of 5.3 percent in the population overall. The jobless rate for whites was 4.8 percent and for Hispanics was 6.6 percent.
Yellen’s remarks were in response to a question posed by US Representative Joyce Beatty as to whether the Federal Reserve was taking the high rate of black unemployment into consideration when assessing the health of the labor market.
Beatty, a Democrat from Ohio, was one of several black committee members, who urged Yellen to consider the excessively high rate of African-American unemployment in deciding when to raise interest rates.
African-Americans were hardest hit racial group from the damage inflicted on the labor market by the Great Recession.
Despite officially ending in June 2009, the recession left millions unemployed for prolonged spells, particularly minority groups.
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