It depends……
This dog has been very pesimistic about the media rah, rahing about a ‘Good Economy’….
Consumer prices are STILL high….
There are daily reports of thosands of lay-offs…..
Gas prices are climbing…..
And the Fed is still raisng interst rates….
But?
President Biden has to be ecstatic ….
Somethings ARE on the positive side…..
Here’s what we know:
After several months of cooling, the economy added far more jobs than economists anticipated. The unemployment rate fell to its lowest level since 1969.
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U.S. employers added 517,000 jobs in January.
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Strong hiring hints at more work ahead for the Fed, but wages cool.
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Leisure and hospitality employers led the outsized January gains.
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January’s job growth is a boost for Biden.
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Markets flinch at hot jobs numbers….
The Federal Reserve has been in an all-out effort to lower inflation, hoping it can manage to hoist interest rates without slowing the economy so much that it undercuts strength in the labor market. But that task appears much more difficult to pull off, with scant signs of a cool down in a labor market that created more than a half million jobs in January…..
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The U.S. economy remains a tangle of contradictory signs. Growth is slowing in many areas, such as housing and manufacturing, and Americans are beginning to rein in spending as they work through pandemic-era savings. But the labor market remains formidable, inflation is beginning to normalize and there are signs that the global economy may be on stronger footing than originally feared.
Although forecasters are still split on whether the U.S. can avoid an economic recession, they are increasingly optimistic that any downturn will be relatively mild….
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President Joe Biden and the White House can celebrate the report as evidence the economy is continuing to hum along, and it will blunt attacks from Republicans over the administration’s spending policies. But senior officials in the West Wing were privately hoping for a less-robust number. So was Fed Chair Jerome Powell.
Here’s how the number is likely to play with four key political and economic figures….
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Still, the more aggressive the Fed feels it has to be in killing inflation, the higher the risk that the central bank will push the economy into recession. A slumping economy would give the Republicans ammunition to use against Biden and the Democrats in the 2024 campaign….
BTW?
There ARE STILL Help wanted signs in places…..
And job growth in other unseen places….
Nearly three years since the coronavirus pandemic upended the labor market, restaurants, bars, hotels and casinos remain short-staffed, with nearly 2 million unfilled openings. The leisure and hospitality industry, which before the pandemic accounted for much of the country’s job growth, is still short roughly 500,000 employees from 2020 levels, even as many other sectors have recovered.
But these workers didn’t disappear. A lot of them, like McGrath, who were laid off early in the pandemic, moved to behind-the-scenes office work where they are more likely to have increased flexibility, stability and often better pay.
Employment in professional and business services — a catchall category that includes office jobs in accounting, law and other white-collar firms — has soared by 1.4 million during the pandemic. And tens of thousands of additional people are working in finance, construction, and transportation and warehousing.
“There’s this reshuffling going on that is explaining why lots of industries can’t find workers,” said Betsey Stevenson, an economics professor at the University of Michigan and former Labor Department chief economist. “Their workers have left to go somewhere else.”…