Jobless Rate Holds the Line
Staying the course isn't always that bad. When it comes to the U.S. economy however, staying the course typically means bad news.
That was the case in February that while the unemployment rate stayed at 9.7 percent, the workforce shed about 36,000 jobs, according to the U.S. Labor Department.
The feds are spinning this into a more positive report than expected, given the series of winter storms that shut down much of the East Coast.
On the positive side, though, today's report froze a trend of easing in the recession-swamped job market in recent months.
However, economists, whose forecasts for Friday's report had variedmore widely than usual, said the February data may be substantially revised in the next few months' reports.
While the losses were significantly less than the consensus estimate of a 68,000 decline for the month, the report did not offer a clear snapshot of the economy’s underlying health, according to the New York Times. With jobs still sparse and stimulus programs coming to a close, economists tell the Times that they are concerned that the labor market’s slow growth may hamper a recovery.
“If you recognize it as one frame in a movie, it is one in which we are moving toward resumption of job growth,” Alan Levenson, chief economist for T. Rowe Price, an investment firm, told the Times. “The labor market is healing."
Ellen Zentner, a senior economist at Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ Ltd. in New York, told Bloomberg Television that the weather did play a role.
"Without the weather in February this would have been a month for jobs growth," Zentner said. "We've got positive jobs growth in there, we just can't see it" due to the "weather effects."
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