News
National Journal | Forget the Unemployment Rate: The Alarming Stat Is the Number of 'Missing Workers'
The federal government’s latest snapshot of the unemployment rate offered few bright spots Friday. The economy added 165,000 jobs in April—slightly better than March’s revised number of 138,000 jobs. Unemployment went down one-tenth of a percentage point to 7.5 percent; and health care, retail trade, and the food-services industry added positions.
Bloomberg | Payrolls in U.S. Rise 165,000 as Unemployment Rate Drops
The median forecast of 90 economists surveyed by Bloomberg projected a 140,000 gain. Revisions added a total of 114,000 jobs to the employment count in February and March.
Econ Comments & Analysis
Businessweek | Why Not Target a 3% Unemployment Rate?
A safe bet is that the unemployment rate won’t breach 6.5 percent, one signal for it to start tightening monetary policy, until 2014, if not later.
Mercatus | Labor Participation Remains Low Despite Job Gains
This year the economy is adding more jobs per month than it did in 2012, according to new data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. However, Mercatus Center senior research fellow Keith Hall—a former BLS commissioner—said that the labor participation rate is still quite low and the economy is not yet adding enough jobs to stimulate a robust recovery.
Blogs
Economist | Not swooning, not soaring
Will America be fourth time lucky? A better-than-expected jobs report for April has soothed fears that the economy was swooning, as it has in the spring or summer of each of the last three years. The relief sent the Dow Jones Industrial Average over 15,000 and the S&P 500 over 1,600 for the first time.
WSJ | Economists React: Last Month ‘Largely a False Alarm’
The decline in the unemployment rate overstates the job market strength as the participation rate continues to sit at 30-year lows. On a trend basis the labor market is definitely improving. – Maninder Sibia, Contingent Macro
