Digging into the details of the jobs report, it looks even more impressive. Not only has the US gained 227K jobs in February, last month’s revisions add a significant 61K.
And there are quite a few other encouraging details, one especially for Bernanke.
In his previous testimony in Washington, Ben Bernanke dismissed the gain in jobs and said that it doesn’t reflect the real situation. One of the things he mentioned was the employment-population ratio. Well, this has gone up now as well.
Here’s a quote from the report:
Both the labor force and employment rose in February. The civilian labor force participation rate, at 63.9 percent, and the employment-population ratio, at 58.6 percent, edged up over the month.
In a second testimony, his tone was slightly better: Bernanke acknowledged the improvement in employment, and said it was surprising.
In addition to the upwards revision and this encouraging figure, it’s important to note that looking at figures that are not seasonally adjusted, the unemployment rate dropped.
The drop is even bigger when looking at the “real unemployment rate†(U-6). It dropped from 16.2% to 15.6%. The seasonally adjusted figure dropped from 15.1% to 14.9%.
Chances are even lower for QE3.
