At Last, Much Better Employment Data

If you’re going to get a huge “upside surprise” only occasionally, it’s great to get it on what is at least politically the most important economic variable, mainly jobs. The BLS did just that for us yesterday when they reported that the drop in nonfarm payroll employment was 11,000 jobs. That was far below the consensus expectation of a loss of 125,000 such jobs. Click here to read the full post and comment (Insights subscribers) »

Sad to Say, the Awful Employment Data Could Have Been Worse

On March 6 the BLS released its report “The Employment Situation: February 2009.” It was chock full of depressing news.

For unknown reasons, some 498,000 people in the US decided that February was a great time to enter the civilian labor force, swelling the seasonally adjusted total to 154,214,000 people, which was still 233,000 people fewer than in December 2008. Unfortunately, the total number of civilian employed in February fell 354,000 to 141,748,000. This meant that 8.1 percent of the civilian labor force or 12,467,000 people were unemployed and looking for work in February.

As the media duly trumpeted, that was the highest unemployment rate since December 1983 when it was 8.3 percent. Of course, that was a dramatic decline from the 10.8 percent unemployment rate of December (and November) 1982, the highest levels since the end of World War II.

Even with an 8.1 percent seasonally adjusted unemployment rate in February, that still meant that 919 out of every 1,000 people who wanted a job last month had one. For the entire 64 years since the end of World War II, there have been only ten months (September 1982 through June 1983) when fewer than nine of every ten people who wanted a job had one. That’s a record nearly every other country in the world would envy.

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