“We believe that the U.S. is best positioned for both a cyclical recovery and dealing with … its growing debt burden,” advised Goldman Sachs’s chief investment officer for private wealth management, Sharmin Mossavar-Rahmani, to the firm’s clients in her investment management division’s “outlook.” There are the usual caveats, but all in all this report trumpets “the economy’s continued upward trajectory in face of a variety of destabilizing shocks…”

Friday’s jobs report supports this guarded optimism. The private sector added 212,000 jobs in December, more than offsetting the 12,000 reduction in public sector employment. Almost every sector of the economy recorded gains. The unemployment rate dropped to 8.5 percent, the lowest since February 2009, from a revised November figure of 8.7 percent.