March Jobs Report

It’s Jobs Day! Before getting into the numbers, here were consensus expectations:

Expectations

• Payrolls: +200k
• Unemployment: ↓ 6.6%

And here were the numbers from March’s report.:

Headline Numbers

• Payrolls: +192k
• Unemployment: Unchanged (6.7%)

Internals

• Labor Force Participation: ↑ 63.2%
  
  • 0.2% Rise
  • +503k joined the labor force
• Employment to Population: ↑ 58.9%
  
  • 0.1% rise
• Private Payrolls back to pre-recession highs
• U-6 Unemployment: ↑ 12.7%
  
  • 1.2% lower than one year ago
• Household Survey
  
  • +476k jobs
• Revisions: Net +37k
  
  • January: +129k revised to +144k
  • February: +175k revised to +197k

Quick Take

We will have more later, but here are the important takeaways from this report:

While some were anticipating a sizeable jobs bounce back in March after harsh winter weather restrained growth in January and February, March’s numbers came in right at the long term trend.  This jobs report reaffirms the Fed’s decisions to steadily wean the economy off of QE and certainly means they will continue to do so in the months ahead.  The report itself was generally positive as the Labor Force Participation showed a nice bump and revisions to past months were positive.  There is some level or irony that the Federal government shed 9k jobs while private payrolls returned to their pre-recession highs – the Federal government’s austerity over the past year has consistently restrained jobs growth while the private sector has been doing much better.  The market responded well as S&P futures bounced higher upon release of the report, in part because it allays fears from earlier 2014 numbers and in part because it reduces uncertainty about the Fed’s next move.  Steady has been the recovery and steady is this jobs report.