The American economy added 165,000 new jobs last month, but about 90,000 of those jobs were needed just to keep up with population growth, so net job growth clocked in at 75,000. That’s OK, but not great. However, the BLS also revised its job growth estimates for the past two months fairly sharply upward. February’s figures are now positively giddy looking.
Overall, the headline unemployment number dropped to 7.5 percent. The number of long-term unemployed declined even more dramatically, and the labor force participation ratio was flat.
Basically, it was all fairly decent news, both in the top line numbers and in the details. If the fiscal cliff deal and the sequester have had a negative impact on the economy, it’s not really showing up in the job numbers yet. So far, 2013 is shaping up as a rerun of 2012, which means that although we still aren’t recovering at the rate we ought to be, at least we’re treading water fairly briskly.
