Minneapolis Fed says U.S. needs ‘a few years’ to recover 10 million lost jobs amid pandemic

The president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis said on Sunday that it will “take a few years” before the U.S. can recover the 10 million jobs lost amid the pandemic.

During an appearance on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” anchor John Dickerson asked Neel Kashkari if the economic recovery from the pandemic will replace the eight million jobs lost, or the 10 million the U.S. would have had if the coronavirus did not impact the economy.

“For me, it’s the 10 million because our population continues to grow, and so those are new people potentially entering the workforce, hopefully entering the workforce,” Kashkari told Dickerson.

“You were exactly right. If the pandemic had not hit, we estimate there would be 10 million more Americans working today, both people who already had jobs and new entrants in the labor force. We need to put all of them back to work,” he added.

He said the Federal Reserve is focused on reaching “maximum employment,” which means “as many Americans as possible gainfully employed and contributing to our economy.”

“For me, I’m looking at when do we recover those 10 million jobs. I think it’s going to take a few years before we can fully get back to that place. But, you know, two years is much better than 10 years. If we can do it faster, so much the better,” Kashkari added.

Kashkari’s comments come after the Bureau of Labor Statistics released the April jobs report, which widely missed economists’ projections.

The report showed that U.S. businesses added just 266,000 new jobs over the course of the month, which was less than the roughly 1 million that economists had projected.