Give thanks, Americans. You're back to work.

The unemployment rate is now 3.6%, lower than it has been in five decades. By letting the labor market aggressively tighten, the Federal Reserve has allowed the prime-age employment rate to recover fully. (Though it hasn’t fully recovered for male workers. The rate for men still has about 1 percentage point to go to reach its pre-crisis level.)

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The lesson here for the Fed is to continue allowing the hot economy — the best jobs program there is — to increase employment. The Fed should always be concerned about inflation, of course. But if anything, inflation has slightly decelerated over the last year or two, and expectations about future inflation — a key driver of actual inflation — are flat. The experiment in very-low unemployment should be allowed to continue until the Fed can see the whites of inflation’s eyes. Another reason to be thankful: the Fed seems to be planning on exactly this. Rate increases in 2020 are (currently) unlikely.

And here’s yet another reason to be grateful this Thanksgiving: the economy in 2020 is set to have a better year. In 2019, the housing market had to absorb the effects of two years of rising interest rates and businesses had to deal with tariffs and uncertainty from Trump’s ill-conceived and badly executed trade war, global economic weakness, and the fading fiscal boost from the 2017 deficit-financed Republican tax cut.

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