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Stormy Daniels is Interviewed about Avenatti Lawsuit; Economy Adds 467,000 jobs in January; White House Reaction to Jobs Report. Aired 8:30-9a ET

Aired February 04, 2022 - 08:30   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

[08:30:00]

STORMY DANIELS, ADULT ENTERTAINER, TESTIFIED MICHAEL AVENATTI DEFRAUDED HER: That that has been my life for 20 years. And I have been turned down for things strictly because of working in the adult film industry. I -- I'm currently re-signed with Wicked Pictures. I'm -- and I know that that's going to come with a whole new set of problems. But the truth is, that's legal. You know, other things Michael Avenatti wanted to introduce was canceled checks for me to the IRS that I paid when I got my book advance. You know, and I never got to stand up for myself and say, well, I paid my taxes, did you? You know, like, it's just -- it's just crazy to me that he created all of these side shows and created doubt. Like, he actually mentioned while I was on the stand, you're an actress, you did porn. Like, you're -- you're used to rehearsing lines and faking things. Like, really? OK.

BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN ANCHOR: And I wonder if, look, if the jury does come back and say that he's guilty, do -- what do you think is the appropriate punishment here? What kind of prison time do you think he should serve?

DANIELS: That I don't know because, at the end of the day, it's not going to get me my money back. He doesn't have it. I just hope that justice is served and it creates, you know, that he's punished for his crimes. I'm going to leave that to the judge because I honestly don't know. I'm way more afraid that if he's found not guilty, this sets a precedent that is absolutely terrifying for anybody in the adult film business, and anybody that works in the paranormal field or even does paranormal as a hobby. Like, basically is free license to commit crimes against us and get away with it. And that's really terrifying. And if -- whether he's found guilty or not, I intend to use my voice to try to rectify that for friends of mine and colleagues of mine.

KEILAR: Well, Stormy, we will be awaiting this verdict, as we know, obviously, you are. And we thank you for being with us this morning.

Stormy Daniels, appreciate it.

DANIELS: Thank you.

KEILAR: So, breaking just moments ago, the January jobs report released, which shows us the severity of the omicron surge. We're going to break down the numbers, next. (COMMERCIAL BREAK)

ANNOUNCER: This is CNN breaking news.

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: We have major, breaking economic news. Surprising breaking economic news. Confusing breaking economic news. The January jobs report is in, and it's way better than people were expecting.

CHRISTINE ROMANS, CNN CHIEF BUSINESS CORRESPONDENT: Yes.

BERMAN: CNN chief business correspondent and anchor of "EARLY START," Christine Romans, here with the numbers.

Romans.

ROMANS: Yes, not at all what we were expecting because omicron really ravaged the economy during January. But, instead, 467,000 net new jobs added back into the economy in January. That is the most jobs gained since August 2021.

This is not the weak jobs figures that so many people had thought. Let me tell you why they were bracing for something terrible. It's because the survey from the government happened the very week some 12 million people were out sick or taking care of someone else who was out sick because of omicron.

[08:35:07]

So we were really looking for that distortion and didn't get it.

I think what you can say here is there is surprising strength among employers who are hungry to hire workers, weathering even the omicron variant here. Four percent was the unemployment rate. A little change. And you saw pretty much broad-based gains in job creation, including leisure and hospitality, professional services, and trade.

So, we're watching these numbers, dig in. There's going to be some what we call benchmark revisions. But, overall, you put together the first 12 months of this Biden presidency, and it looks like it's the best job creation on record since we started counting those numbers from the Great Depression, John.

BERMAN: All right. Romans, you're going to come over and join us.

And also part of this discussion now, CNN economics commentator, a "Washington Post" opinion columnist, Catherine Rampell, and "MarketWatch" market's editor Mark DeCambre.

Catherine, this is just not what people were expecting. The White House had been out earlier in the week bracing people for the possibility of jobs losses.

CATHERINE RAMPELL, CNN ECONOMICS COMMENTATOR: Right, because it looked like the omicron effect was going to overwhelm anything else in the economy. The omicron effect being that there were a lot of workers who were out sick or who were carrying for family members who were out sick. As Christine mentioned at the -- during the week that this survey was conducted, something like 5 million new cases were detected. Of course, those people might still have been counted as employed, if they were getting sick leave, et cetera.

So, it's really hard to know how to parse this report. It does look like, whatever the omicron effect was, it may have been overwhelmed by some seasonal adjustment weirdness, the fact that a lot of businesses are seeing more demand for their services and so they're trying to hire workers.

I'm going to have to dig into it a little bit more to figure out exactly how we got this fantastic number. I hope it's for good reasons and not just sort of like weird, statistical noise.

BERMAN: To be completely blunt, you know, I prepare for this because economics isn't my first or second language here. And zero of my preparation had me ready for this type of job gain. Really.

Mark, does this mean that the economy is saying to omicron, eh?

MARK DECAMBRE, MARKETWATCH MARKETS EDITOR: I mean, I think this is a surprising number, just as you guys said. And we saw the ADP, the private sector report, that showed 301,000 losses for January. So this really led the stage for what we thought would be disappointing numbers.

But I don't know that the economy is back, but it just kind of goes to show how very puzzling this whole economic recovery and economic cycle is in this Covid-19 phase.

BERMAN: I will say, look, people need to know that data has been impossible to read --

RAMPELL: Yes.

BERMAN: For two years now. The pandemic has made economic data very difficult. So you just have to sort of take it as it comes in and then, you know, you revise it later on.

But, Romans, if these numbers are anywhere near right, what does it tell us about the overall strength of the economy.

ROMANS: It tells us exactly what the Fed chief, Jay Powell, has been saying, that the job market is tremendously strong and there are a bunch of revisions and we -- just to be clear, revisions over the year, so we've got to dig into those.

But, overall, what you hear from employers is, we can't find the workers. And what you see in the numbers is people -- it's not necessarily the great resignation anymore, but I heard this yesterday, the great upgrade. People are upgrading their jobs. They're quitting the job they have for better job, better pay.

So I think the story of the American job market, it isn't layoffs or this month is weak, it is about a huge churn like we've never seen in the jobs market before. Wages in this report up 5.7 percent year over year. That's a really important number, I think.

RAMPELL: Well, we'll need to see what happens to inflation, right?

ROMANS: Yes.

RAMPELL: I mean what -- the story of the past year has been, we have seen these strong, nominal wage gains, but they 've been mostly eaten up by inflation.

ROMANS: Right. Right.

RAMPELL: So, take that with a grain of salt.

DECAMBRE: Yes, the wage number was really the most important number. In fact, the market and really many economists were ready to dismiss this January report wholesale with the exception of that wage number because of the impact of inflation. And we're seeing inflation pick up, but perhaps wages pick up and certainly we're seeing that from the employment cost index also showed a big slowdown, but increase overall. And I think there's some questions about whether or not, you know, inflation is going up faster than wages. And that seems to be clearly the case.

BERMAN: Romans, sectors? I had seen -- I had seen as it came out, leisure?

ROMANS: Yes. That surprised me too. Leisure and hospitality. I thought you would have lost jobs there. But you had gains in leisure and hospitality, gains in professional services, which I think we've seen all year.

There was an amazing story in "The Wall Street Journal" this week about headhunters who are going after teachers who want to quit and retire, and they're putting them in sales, marketing, IT, all these professional business services jobs. There's been huge demand there.

[08:40:01]

BERMAN: So, Catherine, again, humor me for a moment with the notion that these numbers are not going to change wildly and revise and -- or are an accurate reading of where the economy is. If we're adding jobs in leisure now, and this hospitality is, what --

ROMANS: Yes.

BERMAN: I mean does this mean -- does this show that the economy is beginning to move beyond the pandemic, if people are going out to eat, if people are staying in hotels, if people are going on vacations, which, again, the data today shows it's trending in that direction.

What's the implication going forward?

RAMPELL: That would certainly be good news for the economy. Leisure and hospitality was one of the most pandemic sensitive sectors because -- for exactly the reasons that you imply, that it's higher risk to go out to eat, to travel, et cetera, than to stay at home and, you know, click buttons and have things delivered to you essentially. So those sectors had suffered among the biggest job gains throughout the economy, if, in fact -- and they have been adding back jobs, but they're still well below their levels pre-pandemic. But if, in fact, we did see a big boost in leisure and hospitality, again, it's hard to parse a little bit because there's some like usual seasonal patterns that they correct for and the seasonal patterns may not hold.

ROMANS: Yes. January is a really tough month, by the way.

RAMPELL: Yes. It's a weird month. So, I don't want to, you know, I don't want to put, like, a hundred -- all of my eggs in that basket that, like, the number is good and so, therefore, that industry is healthy. It could be some other weird stuff. But it would be a good sign, of course, if leisure and hospitality are adding back jobs.

And I think what we're seeing in general is that we've had several new variants, right, for Covid. And each time there had been -- a lot more people have gotten sick, obviously, but there's been a smaller impact in terms of the actual economic effects. And maybe that's good and maybe that's bad. Maybe it means we're adapting. Maybe it means that people are being put in more vulnerable positions, I don't know. But it does seem that each time we get a new wave of this pandemic and people are anticipating a big hit to employment, we -- it's more muted than expected.

DECAMBRE: I mean the trend seems good, but I think the jury's still out. January, as you said, is historically a tough month to read. And if we had gotten a losing number, a negative number, we have dismissed that.

RAMPELL: Right.

DECAMBRE: And maybe to some extent we should fade this one too until we get more clarity into February and March.

ROMANS: Yes.

DECAMBRE: But the trend looks OK. There's a lot of data, a lot of further data to parse.

BERMAN: Let me ask you this a different way. What would an economy getting over the pandemic look like?

DECAMBRE: Well, I mean, I think we'd need to look into the numbers a little bit more. But, you know, some areas of, you know, I don't know what the labor force participation number came in as because it could go, as we said --

ROMANS: Little changed.

DECAMBRE: Yes, so that's one of the big areas that's problematic. Labor force participation was around 63 percent -- over 63 percent before the pandemic. And it's still around 61 percent or so, 61.9 percent, if it's unchanged. Then that's -- that's not -- that means, you know, you don't have that full throttle economy because more people are out of the economy than it previously did (ph). ROMANS: The summer was revised down a bit. We thought the summer was real big and strong. There's some data revisions in the summer, which I think is important to note. And I also think there's this disconnect with how people feel and what all the numbers taken together show about the economy. We've talked about that a lot. People feel really cruddy about the economy. The Fed doesn't. The Fed knows the economy is recovering. The inflation is running too hot. The Fed's going to start raising interest rates in a strong economy. So there's -- there's really kind of two sides to this story here, how people say they feel about it and what we see in these numbers.

BERMAN: All right, Romans, Catherine, Mark, I know what we're all going to do as soon as we go to break here, which is dig in and try to -- try to make sense of this.

RAMPELL: Yes.

BERMAN: I really appreciate you being here for this very surprising release of data.

How is the White House going to respond to this jobs report? Hmm, I wonder.

That's next.

KEILAR: And the U.S. government says Russia has been concocting a plan to use a graphic propaganda video portraying fake corpses and crying actors as a pretext to invade Ukraine. We are live from Ukraine.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[08:48:20]

KEILAR: More now on our breaking economic news. The U.S. economy adding 467,000 jobs last month, just crushing expectations.

CNN White House correspondent John Harwood joining us now.

Certainly, a welcome report for the White House.

JOHN HARWOOD, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Brianna, they had been bracing for a bad report. This is what they've been waiting for, for months, that is a report that substantially outpaced our expectations, 467,000 jobs is a great number. Unemployment ticked up a little bit, but it's only 4 percent. But the truth is, this doesn't tell us anything we didn't already know. This is a red-hot jobs market, and that would have been true even if this was a negative number today.

We've all talked about how the statistical reporting has gotten weird during the pandemic because of when employers submit their data, and because of immediate reaction to things like the omicron variant. So, yes, this is great, big job growth, but that's not the issue at this point.

We've known that anybody who wants a job pretty much can find one right now. There are more available jobs than there are unemployed people. And the challenge is going to be sustaining the significance of that wage growth that you talked about in the last segment with Catherine, that is to say inflation has outpaced wage growth for a significant segment, not everyone, people at the bottom end of the scale have been coming out ahead of inflation over the last several months. But the challenge is reducing inflation for -- as it affects wage earners and the rest of the wage distribution.

[08:50:01]

KEILAR: Yes, huge numbers. Thank you so much, John Harwood.

And we should note that you are going to have more coverage on this coming up. So, thank you for that.

Just in to CNN, these photos of Russian President Vladimir Putin getting comfortable at the Beijing Olympics. What his united front with Chinese President Xi Jinping just said to the world.

BERMAN: Plus, heart-stopping video of a dog trapped in a burning car. The harrowing rescue ahead.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BERMAN: A dog in Colorado is lucky to be alive this morning after being trapped in a car fire. This dramatic video shows the moment police arrived when a man was screaming for someone to help save his pet.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: My dog -- the dog in the car.

[08:55:00]

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Dog in the car?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: My dog's in the car! Oh, my god!

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Where is it at?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: He could be in the back. Right here.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Right here?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes.

(INAUDIBLE). Come on, man! Hank!

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Is it unlocked?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: (INAUDIBLE).

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It's sort of manual lock. It's right here. Come on. Hank, come on.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Come on, buddy. UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I can't get him. Come on. Come on, Hank. Oh, God!

Oh, God!

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Come on.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Oh -- oh, my God!

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BERMAN: I've got to say, that's really something.

The dog, we believe the name was Hank there, a veterinarian who lived next door has confirmed that Hank's doing OK.

KEILAR: I want to rename "The Good Stuff" "tissue time," because I'm telling you, whoo, that's unbelievable.

BERMAN: Really crazy. Good for all of them. Glad Hank's doing well.

CNN's coverage continues right after this.

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