February’s Jobs Report in 10 Charts - Real Time Economics

The U.S. economy added 295,000 jobs in February, the 12th straight month where job gains surpassed 200,000. That adds up to 3.3 million net new jobs, the best yearlong period of job gains in nearly 15 years.

The headline jobless rate declined to 5.5%, the lowest since May 2008 and down from 5.7% in January. Measures of unemployment that include discouraged workers and marginally attached workers also declined. The broadest measure of underemployment, which also includes part-time workers who would like full-time work, declined to 11%, from 11.3% last month.

The share of Americans participating in the labor force edged down slightly and remains near the lowest level in 36 years. The share of Americans with jobs was unchanged this month but has improved over the past year.

Most of the employment gains over the past five years have come from full-time jobs. But the recovery has not yet been sufficient to restore the number of full-time jobs that the economy had before the recession.
 Unemployment has fallen for workers of all education levels.
Despite the improvement in the overall rate of unemployment, an unusually large share of the unemployed have remained out of work for half a year or more. Among the unemployed, 31.1% have been jobless for more than half a year, a higher share than during any of the previous three recessions.
The average spell of unemployment remains unusually long at 13.4 weeks.
The share of workers facing short-term unemployment is back to prerecession levels. The share of long-term unemployment remains elevated.

Average hourly earnings have yet to show a sustainable rise and have hovered near 2% annual gains for most of the recovery.

The Federal Reserve estimated in December that an unemployment rate of 5.2% to 5.5% would be consistent with full employment. That means that today’s report has pushed the unemployment rate squarely within the Fed’s “full employment” range. Officials will update their forecasts later this month, but the unemployment rate falling into their range could be a key factor behind a decision to raise interest rates later this year.
By Josh Zumbrun and  Nick Timiraos

February’s Jobs Report in 10 Charts - Real Time Economics

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

IMF Executive Board Discusses the First Assessment of Eligible Countries under the Multilateral Debt Relief Initiative

On December 21, 2005 the Executive Board of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) established the list of countries that qualify for debt relief from the Fund under the Multilateral Debt Relief Initiative (MDRI). Debt relief delivery, which could start as soon as January 3, 2005, is now conditional on getting the consents of all the contributors to the Subsidy Account of the Poverty Reduction and Growth Facility (PRGF) Trust, whose contributions help finance the Initiative. The MDRI will deliver debt relief from the Fund to qualifying members countries with an annual per capita income at or below US$380, and to countries above the threshold that have reached the completion point under the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) Initiative. The implementation of the MDRI will reduce the external debt burden of a number of the world's poorest countries and will provide additional resources to help them reach the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Background The Executive Board appro...
Read more

Oil’s chaotic collapse deepens; stocks drop worldwide

Image
NEW YORK (AP) — Oil prices crumpled even further Tuesday, and U.S. stocks sank to their worst loss in weeks as worries swept markets worldwide about the economic carnage caused by the coronavirus pandemic. The market’s spotlight was again on oil, where prices have plummeted because very few people are flying or driving, and factories have shut amid widespread stay-at-home orders. Global demand is set to drop to levels last seen in the mid 1990s. At the same time, oil producers can’t slow their production fast enough, and all the extra crude means storage tanks are quickly running out of room. The cost for a barrel of U.S. oil to be delivered in June plunged 43% to $11.57. That’s the part of the market that oil traders are focused on and trading most actively. For oil to be delivered next month, which is when storage tanks could top out, the cost of a barrel stood at $10.01. A day earlier, it fell below zero for the first time, meaning traders paid others to take oil off their hand...
Read more

Mapping Extreme Poverty Around the World A new report from the

Image
A new report from the  World Bank  just landed, finding that a record low of 10% of humanity now live in extreme poverty, down from 11% in 2013. But poverty rates aren’t anywhere close to equal between continents or even countries, as our new series of maps clearly demonstrates. The World Bank provides an in-depth explanation for its methodology, which you can find in Appendix A of the full report  here . We focused on the percentage of people in each country living below what the World Bank defines as extreme poverty, or $1.90/day. We’ll let the researchers defend this definition on their own, but there is one caveat to keep in mind. It can be extraordinarily difficult to collect reliable data from so many countries on a regular basis, and in fact we used the latest year in which numbers were available whenever possible. For example, in some of these maps we compare 2011 figures against 2015. In short, our maps provide the clearest possible apples-to-apples compa...
Read more