The American economy added 288,000 new jobs in March, but about 90,000 of those jobs were needed just to keep up with population growth, so net job growth clocked in at 198,000. The headline unemployment rate dropped to 6.1 percent.
As with last month, there are no serious gotchas in this month’s report. The labor participation rate was stable once again, and the unemployment rate fell for the right reason: because more people were getting jobs, not because people were dropping out of the labor force. We’ve now have five consecutive months of good—but not great—jobs reports, and June’s report is an encouraging sign that the Q1 dip in GDP really was an anomaly, not a sign of things to come.
