A Decent Monthly Establishment Employment Report This Morning: +214K Jobs: Daily Focus
But more important is to look at the Household Report trends: at the 59.2% for the adult employment-to-population ratio:
That means that the past year is the first year–the very first year–of the so-called “recovery” in which the employment-to-population ratio has not flatlined:
This past year is the first year in which we can say that anything like a labor market “recovery” is in process. (Yes, I know population aging–but there is a lot of data suggesting that the real estate crash of 2006-2009 induced a lot of unretirement to keep the voluntarily retired proportion of the adult population roughly constant.)
Of course, we are still very far away from anything like the normal we had grown used to from 1990-2007:
With a 59.2% adult employment-to-population ratio, we have no business having a 5.8% unemployment rate: no business at all:
But it is vastly better than having–as we had last October–a 58.5% employment-to-population ratio