Jobs Report

I would be remiss not to remark on this week’s employment news. The economy added a decent 155,000 jobs in December. Coincidentally that is almost exactly the average monthly gain we have experienced for the past two years. So the recent trend continues. We add sufficient jobs to absorb new workers coming into the workforce, but not enough to whittle down unemployment very quickly. The unemployment rate remains 7.8% and doesn’t look likely to move much until spring at the earliest. There were a couple of changes to prior months also reported today: October’s job growth was reduced slightly from 138,000 to 137,000; whilst November’s was boosted from 146,000 to 161,000. Neither change adds much to our understanding of the trend.

Even the detail has become mundane: jobs were added across most sectors of the economy, health care led the way with 45,000 new jobs, while only the retail and government sectors lost jobs – the latter being the biggest loser, shedding 13,000 jobs in the month.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the report is that, by being so close to the recent average, it suggests that all the horror stories about the uncertainty created by the fiscal cliff debacle – remember the cliff was supposed to be a major reason businesses were not hiring – were wildly overblown. Clearly business chugged along regardless. We are already being treated to a reprise of the horror message as we head towards the great debt ceiling confrontation in the next two months. Maybe we should all take a deep breath and relax. The shenanigans in Washington is being tuned out by huge swathes of the country. Or, at least, we have become sufficiently inured to the nonsense down there that we plod along and try to ignore the silliness.

At any rate, this report speaks to a remarkable stability. We are growing. We are growing too slowly. The theme stays the same.