Live updates: US economy added a whopping 254,000 jobs last month | CNN Business

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell and his colleagues at the central bank are keenly aware that the labor market is weakening.

“By so many measures, the labor market is still solid, but it really has cooled,” Powell said at an economics conference held in Nashville, Tennessee, earlier this week. “If you’re out of work now, it’s going to be harder to find a job than it was two years ago when the labor market was extremely tight.”

At the same time, Powell and other Fed officials have said they don’t want to see the labor market weaken even further than it has, which is why most voted to lower interest rates by a half point last month versus the more typical quarter-point cut.

Fed Governor Michelle Bowman, who favored a quarter-point cut last meeting, said the unemployment rate, which has risen from 3.7% at the start of this year to 4.2% as of August, “largely reflects weaker hiring, as job seekers entering or re-entering the labor force are taking longer to find work, while layoffs remain low.”

But there’s another factor that’s contributing: “A mismatch between the skills of the new workers and available jobs,” Bowman said at a banking conference in Charleston, South Carolina earlier this week. In other words, the people looking for work aren’t able to find jobs because they don’t have the qualifications employers are looking for in candidates to fill openings.