After nearly two years of horrible jobs report, we finally got one that’s not so horrible. Though it’s not so good either.
Let’s start with the good news. Nonfarm payrolls fell by 247,000 last month. That’s the shallowest decline in nearly a year. The unemployment rate ticked down from 9.5% to 9.4%. If you want to go out a few more decimal places, it fell from 9.507% to 9.360%.
If we look at the numbers more closely, we see that the civilian labor force dropped by 422,000 last month (that’s seasonally adjusted) while the number of employed dropped by 155,000 (note that that is a different calculation from the NFP report).
In other words, the increase in the employment rate is due to the fact that people are leaving the job market faster than people are losing jobs.
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