Bloomberg’s headline has the jobs report “crushing” expectations. The number came in more than 20,000 ahead of the 230,000 that had been widely expected. And the number for the previous month was crushed upward. As Bloomberg reports:
Employers in the U.S. added more jobs than forecast in January, capping the biggest three-month gain in 17 years, and workers’ earnings jumped. The 257,000 advance in payrolls last month followed a 329,000 gain in December that was bigger than previously reported, figures from the Labor Department showed Friday in Washington. The median forecast in a Bloomberg survey of economists called for a 228,000 increase. The unemployment rate climbed to 5.7 percent as the improving job market lured more Americans into the labor force.
This is undeniably good news. And one wonders how it could all possibly have come to pass in the face of gridlock in Washington and what is described (no kidding) as austerity in the spending of federal money.
If this is what we get with gridlock and austerity, then perhaps what we need is more of the same.
