A few weeks ago, it was widely assumed that fears of going over the so-called “fiscal cliff” would cause employment to stagnate.
Things didn’t really work out that way. Hiring continued at a decent pace in December.
As I’ve said many times before, we’d all like to see these graphs looking stronger, but there was really no plausible scenario for that to happen given the dynamics of the financial crisis, the housing bust, and the collapse in new construction. More stimulus efforts from governments at all levels would have helped, for sure, but any serious effort was politically impossible.
Moments ago, the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimated that the nation added 171,000 jobs in October. That number (like all of those is here) is adjusted for seasonality. And that’s a pretty good number — it suggests that our recovery…
The number of people identifying themselves as unemployed (looking for work but unable to find any) fell by 456,000 over the month.
Estimates vary widely, but the 115,000 jobs added in April in the U.S. is about the number needed to keep pace with population growth.
So that’s not a disastrous number under normal circumstances, but it looks pretty bad considering the deep hole we still need to climb out of.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics announced this morning that 120,000 nonfarm jobs were added to the U.S. economy in March. The unemployment rate is now 8.2%, down from 8.3% a month ago. (All numbers are seasonally adjusted.) Nevertheless, this is…
