The labor market has substantial momentum. Employment growth powered through the difficult Omicron wave, adding 1.75 million jobs over the past three months. The unemployment rate has fallen to 3.8 percent, near historical lows, and has reached this level much faster than anticipated by most forecasters (figure 1). While disparities in employment remain, job growth has been widespread across racial, ethnic, and demographic groups.
An international process for monitoring implementation on a bank-by-bank basis has become increasingly necessary as capital standards have relied to a greater extent on internal market-risk or credit-risk models, the parameters and operation of which are not transparent. This tendency has combined with the relatively opaque nature of bank balance sheets to complicate external efforts to assess how banks are meeting their capital requirements.