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May 02, 2008
April jobs down 20,000
That's less than I expected. Here's a link to the current BLS report and the first paragraph summary.
Nonfarm payroll employment was little changed in April (-20,000), following job losses that totaled 240,000 in the first 3 months of the year, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor reported today. The unemployment rate, at 5.0 percent, also was little changed in April. Employment continued to decline in construction, manufacturing, and retail trade, while jobs were added in health care and in professional and technical services.
While it was less than I expected, I'm certainly not jumping up and down. The economy is marking time until it works its way out of the credit market problems that the housing boom created. Today's data makes me marginally more confident that we can avoid an "official" recession. Yet at the same time, I don't think anyone should be under the illusion that this is over yet.
Felix Salmon had an interesting post recently that sums it up well.
I feel like we're at a fork in the road right now. There are two possible outcomes: either the crisis will remain contained within the housing and finance sectors, in which case we should be able to bounce back, or else it will feed through into the economy more generally, in which case defaults will rise, employment will fall, and a nasty recession, complete with negative official growth rates, will bite right in the middle of the presidential election campaign. The Fed has done what it can; the dice are rolled. All we can do now is watch to see what happens.
Thing is, we have been standing at that fork for a while now.
Posted by William Polley at May 2, 2008 04:36 PM
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Comments
The US is on a declniing branch of labor force participation rate. The next 10 years of so will be charaterized by a slowdown (if not downturn) in labor force supply. No danger for real economic growth, although.
http://thumbsnap.com/v/pJaC35XB.png
http://inflationusa.blogspot.com/2008/05/modeling-labor-force-participation-in.html
Posted by: kio at May 3, 2008 06:46 AM