06/02/2018
From The New York Times:
We Ran Out of Words to Describe How Good the Jobs Numbers Are
The economy is in a sweet spot, with steady growth and broad improvement in the labor market.
By Neil Irwin
June 1, 2018The real question in analyzing the May jobs numbers released Friday is whether there are enough synonyms for “good” in an online thesaurus to describe them adequately.
So, for example, “splendid” and “excellent” fit the bill. Those are the kinds of terms that are appropriate when the United States economy adds 223,000 jobs in a month, despite being nine years into an expansion, and when the unemployment rate falls to 3.8 percent, a new 18-year low.
“Salubrious,” “salutary” and “healthy” work as words to describe the 0.3 percent rise in average hourly earnings, which are up 2.7 percent over the last year — a nice improvement but also not the kind of sharp increase that might lead the Federal Reserve to rethink its cautious path of interest rate increases.
And a broader definition of unemployment, which includes people who have given up looking for a job out of frustration, fell to 7.6 percent. The jobless rate for African-Americans fell to 5.9 percent, the lowest on record, which we would count as “great.”
This is not to say that it couldn’t all blow up. But 19 months after Trump’s election, markets are acting pretty confidently, which is worth remembering despite all the hullaballoo.
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