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Today is new jobs day, and my usual chart is below. It shows the number of net new jobs created over the past few years; that is, the number of new jobs above the 90,000 per month needed just to keep up with population growth and tread water. In January, that amounted to 153,000 net new jobs, pushing the headline unemployment rate down to 8.3%. That’s pretty good news. Brad Plumer has a useful warning about data revisions here. Jared Bernstein provides some context and details here. Matt Yglesias talks about what we need to do to keep the recovery going here.
