The March jobs report shows a nation where unemployment dropped slightly, to 4.3%, but some economists are cautioning the overall news may not be cause for celebration.
March was the best month for job gains since December 2024, according to Heather Long, chief economist at Navy Federal.
But the “full brunt” of the war is not reflected in the March report, NBC News reported, as the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ surveys were completed by March 12 — just 13 days into the war.
“Experts say the Iran war has already shifted the economic landscape in the weeks since the surveys for this report were conducted,” NBC adds.
“Broadly,” NBC notes, “the jobs market remains at a standstill — what many experts are calling a ‘no-hire, no fire’ environment, in which both layoffs and new placements are subdued.”
Indeed, just before the jobs report dropped on Friday, The New York Times’ Ben Casselman wrote that job growth “has slowed nearly to zero. But unemployment remains low because the labor force isn’t growing either. So the labor market is ‘balanced,’ but workers feel stuck.”
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He called it a “no-growth labor market.”
Heather Long points to “the somewhat troubling news,” noting that while the unemployment rate fell, it was “not for great reasons. There’s a big drop (almost -400k) in the labor force. The labor force participation rate also fell. It appears people stopped looking for work in March or perhaps more migrants left the workforce (or both).”
She also notes that wage growth has slowed, to 3.5 percent. As inflation rises — it is expected to go above 4 percent — workers’ paychecks will not be keeping pace with inflation.
The New York Times reports that the March jobs numbers “were collected before the energy price shock caused by the war in the Middle East tightened its grip on the global economy.”
“Forecasters have estimated that persistently higher oil prices will slow job creation and raise unemployment in a year they had expected the economy to regain some vigor,” the Times notes.
Harvard professor of economics Jason Furman adds that the three-month job creation average is 68,000. During the last year of the Biden presidency, the average monthly job creation was 186,000.
Mike Konczal, Senior Director of Policy and Research for the Economic Security Project, noticed some “darker clouds.”
“The length of time people are spending in unemployment has gotten longer in the past year, and still continues to increase,” Konczal writes. “This is no doubt adding to people’s discontent even with low overall rate.”
He also warns that it’s “not clear” the current conditions survive “the global shock of war.”
READ MORE: How Trump’s Iran War ‘Emasculated’ America: Columnist
Image via Reuters
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