Ben Casselman sums up today’s jobs report:
The economy added 192,000 jobs in March, the 42nd consecutive month of growth, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday. All the gains were in the private sector, pushing nongovernment employment to 116 million, just above the prior record set in January 2008, when the recession was just beginning. The private sector lost 8.8 million jobs in the recession and has gained 8.9 million since.
But the wounds of the recession are far from fully healed. Total payrolls remain more than 400,000 below their prior peak due to deep cuts in the number of government workers, especially at the state and local level. And the adult population (16 years and older) has grown by 14 million since the recession began, meaning the U.S. job market is nowhere close to fully recovered on a per-capita basis.
Drum is relatively upbeat:
This is basically good news. The labor force participation rate increased because 500,000 people entered the labor force, and the raw number of unemployed stayed about the same. The fact that people are returning to the labor force is pretty positive, as is the fact that jobs numbers for January and February were revised upward a bit. Jared Bernstein points out that wage growth has been fairly strong over the past year, which also counts as good news as long as the Fed doesn’t use this as an excuse to start tightening monetary policy.
Ylan Mui sees the report as a sign that the economy could finally takeoff:
[M]any analysts believe the economy grew at a paltry rate of 2 percent or less during the first quarter. (The government’s official estimate won’t be released until the end of the month.) That threatened forecasts that the economy could expand at a rate of 3 percent this year for the first time in nearly a decade. The solid job growth in March — if it holds up in future months — puts that goal back within striking distance.
Danny Vinik throws cold water:
[W]hile the nearly 200,000 jobs is a welcome development, the recovery has still not hit second gear. Month-to-month jobs reports contain a lot of noise as the sampling error is high and revisions can change the numbers significantly. One way to filter out some of that noise is to use a three-month moving average. As you can see, job growth has fluctuated between 150,000 and 200,000 jobs for years now:
Cassidy notes that the many groups are still doing very poorly:
[R]ather than trying to further parse the payroll numbers, let’s look, for once, at the distributional data in the report, which shows that a great deal of variation and inequity are persisting, despite the over-all improvement. The recovery has been real for some groups, particularly those with college educations and whites who aren’t trapped in extended spells of unemployment. But, for other groups, including the long-term unemployed, African-Americans, and young adults who aren’t in college, finding work remains a formidable challenge, and finding a decent job is even harder.
But Bill McBride wants the recovery put in perspective:
Although this was a slow recovery compared to most previous recessions, this was actually a relatively fast recovery compared to recessions following a severe financial crisis. It is easy to complain about policy makers, but we have to recognize that some policies actually helped ease the pain for millions of workers.
The Dish 