The U.S. economy is doing remarkably well and expanded quicker in the past four years than some people predicted even before the pandemic, which dragged it into a brief but deep recession, Federal Reserve Bank of New York President John Williams said.

"The economy is doing remarkably well," Williams told a lecture in Mumbai on Friday. "Unemployment is low and growth is good."

The cost of this growth run was an unsustainable tightness in the labor market, which contributed to a surge in inflation, he added.

"All the indicators of our labor market, whether vacancies, unemployment, job quit rates, and survey evidence, ... wage growth, they're all telling us the labor market in the U.S. was red hot and not sustainable and one of the factors driving the high inflation," Williams said. (Reporting by Balazs Koranyi; Editing by Andrew Heavens)