Perhaps the last nail of the recession’s end has appeared. Earlier today the BLS released the march data for payroll employment and the unemployment rate. The data released showed that jobs grew by less than the market and experts expected. The Unemployment Rate remained unchanged. Many took the BLS report as disappointing. However this analyst couldn’t be more thrilled with the release. Here is why.

In my previous posts I covered when the economy turned as well as why we could not conclusively say the recession was over. The primary pillar that had not materialized was positive job growth. The data indicated a trend of smaller and smaller losses, but we had not crossed into positive gains. In March, the last pillar of a recovery appeared, that of positive job growth. Looking deeper in the numbers, if you exclude the impact of temporary hiring of workers for the 2010 census and the rebound from February’s snow related shut downs in the mid Atlantic belt, you still see a net gain in the number of jobs from the payroll data. If we can keep in positive job growth territory, albeit at a low level, we have a real chance of a sustained recovery.

The Unemployment Rate remained unchanged and is likely to be somewhat “sticky” in response to job gains. As in March, there is likely to be influxes to the labor force (those counted as “actively looking for work”) from groups that previously exited it due to discouragement, to pursue education and retraining, and movement from full-time to part-time, etc. Look for the Unemployment rate to remain stubbornly high.

I believe there is also another significant factor at play in this economic business cycle swing. Many of those that lost their jobs, lost them because of the weakness of demand in the economy. Thus, most of them were cyclically unemployed. However, this time more than any in our history, many of the jobs lost will never come back. The new jobs will be for different skills. Hence a large number of people, having become unemployed from cyclical forces, will now be structurally unemployed. This situation creates significant impacts which calls for different expectations and solutions than previous recoveries called for. I will cover this more in an upcoming post.

Again, from this analysts view, April 2, 2010 was indeed a Good Friday for the US Economy.

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