By Ann Saphir
(Reuters) – Dallas Federal Reserve Bank President Robert Kaplan said on Monday that while “a lot” of his business contacts had complained that the now-expired $600 weekly benefits to the unemployed made it harder for them to hire, the data does not show that they hurt the job market overall.
“We’ve looked at a number of studies, we’ve done our own work: we don’t see it as much in the data but I can tell you I’m hearing it from business people,” Kaplan told Bloomberg TV. “While it may have made it hard for certain individual businesses to hire, it has helped create jobs, because it has helped bolster consumer spending, so the net effect still has probably been positive for the economy for employment.”
(Reporting by Ann Saphir; Editing by Kevin Liffey)
