Author: Gregg Giboney, CFA, Timberline Investment Management
Covestor model: Dividend and Growth
Friday’s release of monthly employment data cast a pall over the markets.
Despite some potential affect from warm weather conditions earlier in the year, today’s numbers reflect slowing job growth. Compared to expectations for 170,000 new jobs, today’s report came in at 115,000 new jobs.
The positive number is nice, but most economists feel this number needs to be closer to +200,000 for a meaningful improvement in labor conditions.
Within today’s numbers, it was nice to see private sector jobs were up 130,000. Government jobs were down 15,000.
The March payroll number was revised up to +154,000 from +120,000.
The unemployment rate did fall from 8.2% to 8.1%. This looks good but there was a notable decline in people participating in the labor force from 63.8% to 63.6%. That probably made the unemplyment rate look better than it should.
One number of interest to me as a potential leading indicator, the average private workweek hours, remained at 33.8 hours for the fourth consecutive month.
Some economists are looking ahead to the next monthly labor report as a better indicator of emplyment conditions with the passing of the mentioned weather effects. For now, the economy appears to be progressing in a positive but sliggish manner.
