not increase interest rates this year or the short term and possible talks or progress on talks between the chinese and the americans. joining me now to work through this is grant thornton chief economist diane swank. thank you for being here. good to be here. we have spent years parsing jobs reports. this one s not bad. lots of jobs added to the economy in december. the unemployment rate went up. people tweeting me how can those two things happen at the same time. weit was a great jobs number and what s interesting is how many women are throwing their hat in the ring and saying they want to rejoin the labor force. that s where the biggest gains have come, particularly this month and over the last year, as well. we are still lagging on men rejoining the labor force and some of the hardest hit by unemployment. women have not only gotten higher educational attainment but seeing opportunities and
and shift. key words pulled out of the comments very deliberate and if they had to they would shift and dealt with the balance sheet and if an issue for markets, of course we d deal with it. flexibility and what markets are responding to is that ironically a fed with less certainty of where rates are going, going forward, is better news for financial markets. right. they re responsive. more encouraging to investors than certainty about raising rates. and this federal reserve, they do not want to go down as a federal reserve that killed the expansion and don t want to be the ones to blame. thank you for talking with me. diane swonk at grant thornton. thank you. we could hear from congressional leaders meeting with the president right now on day 14 of the partial government shutdown. today s meeting is longer than the one held on wednesday at the white house. we ll keeping an eye on the