February+Jobs+Report

The government has just released the labor department report, which shows that 227,000 new jobs were added in February, and the unemployment rate is at 8.3%. Some of the good signs include the hiring of 45,000 temporary workers, which is a sign of a normal recovery. Additionally, productivity is going down which means that companies will need to hire more people. Furthermore, more people put themselves out into the job-seeking role, which normally hurts the unemployment rate but it has remained the same at 8.3%. However, not everything is good. Only 7% of the people who lost their jobs are back to where they were before and 5.4 million Americans have been out of work for at least six months. Also the hourly wage is only up .1%. These indications mostly look good but we never know. Last year we saw similar situations, but it turned out not to lead to improvement. This year there are some firmer trends, we have six months of decent gains, which gives us more momentum but with Europe in trouble, China slowing and the situations in Iran, there’s no way to tell what will happen.

Question: Do you think that we will have a repeat of last year or we will continue to progress further?media type="custom" key="14058420"