The BLS reports that nonfarm payrolls (i.e., "jobs") increased by 216,000 and the unemployment rate decreased to 8.8% in March (from 8.9% in February).
The slow employment recovery is consistent with the pattern established by the two recessions of the "great moderation" era, in 1990-91 and 2001, but those recessions were quite mild by comparison. This is a disappointment to those of us who were hoping that the a severe recession would be followed by a sharp recovery, like in the last downturn of comparable magnitude, in 1981-82.
On a non-seasonally adjusted basis, the unemployment rate fell from 9.5% to 9.2%, and payroll employment rose by 925,000. That is, the economy actually added alot of jobs in March, but a large part of that is a normal seasonal increase, so we shouldn't get excited about it.
See also: Calculated Risk, Ezra Klein, Sudeep Reddy.
2 comments:
Gotta love the St. Louis Fed.
Is there any good explanation for this pattern of slow employment recovery?
Oh, and why "twenty-cent" paradigms? Is that your two-cents-worth, after inflation??
Yes! I'd be hurting without FRED.
I like your hypothesis on the blog title - I may use it next time someone asks, but the original idea was a (bad?) pun: "paradigm - pair of dimes - twenty cents".
Hopefully there's some good research being done on the slowness of the recovery. The main ideas floating around out there that I'm aware of are: (i) many of the pre-"moderation" recessions were caused by the Fed raising rates to choke off inflation, and it easy for the Fed to move in the opposite direction and (ii) recoveries after financial crises tend to be very slow as people rebuild their balance sheets - i.e., they need to save more to make up for the wealth lost in the "crash". Obviously, those aren't mutually exclusive.
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