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Wall
Street Journal
Job
Growth Slows to a Trickle
Unemployment Rate Falls One-Tenth
of a Percentage Point to 7.6%
By Brenda Cronin
The
unemployment rate ticked down
to 7.6% in March while only 88,000 non-farm payrolls were added to the
economy.
Sudeep Reddy and Phil Izzo analyze the numbers. Photo: Getty Images.
Employers
added fewer jobs in March
than in any month in almost a year, a dark cloud after several months
of slowly
improving conditions in labor markets.
Just
88,000 jobs were created last
month, far below February's 268,000 gain. The unemployment rate,
derived from a
separate survey, dropped to a four-year low of 7.6%. But the decline
was
prompted by nearly a half-million workers leaving the job market, not
job growth.
There’s
no way to sugarcoat it:
This was a lousy March employment report. Ben Casselman discusses
takeaways
from the jobs data. Photo: AP.
Friday's
report from the Labor
Department pushed investors out of stocks and into safer alternatives.
The Dow
Jones Industrial Average fell 172 points minutes after the report was
released,
but erased most of its losses to finish down 40.86 points, or 0.28%, to
14565.25. Demand for the perceived safety of U.S. Treasury bonds was
strong,
however, pushing the yield on the benchmark 10-year note down to
1.698%, its
lowest this year.
The
report is likely to mute
talk—which had grown louder recently—that the Federal Reserve might
move to
curtail the pace of its bond buying, which is aimed at lowering
long-term
interest rates in an effort to spur spending, investment and hiring.
Fed
officials have said they would
buy long-term Treasury and mortgage bonds until the job-market outlook
has
improved substantially. One Fed official this week raised the
possibility of a
job market strong enough by summer for the central bank to begin
pulling back
from the program. But the March picture could raise doubts inside the
Fed about
how quickly the job market is healing and deflate that possibility.
The
March reading stirred some
fears of yet another "springtime swoon" for the labor market. In
recent years, hiring has started the year strong, only to wilt as the
weather
warmed.
Friday's
report underscored this
point, as the government revised up its estimates for January and
February by a
combined 61,000 jobs. Even with those revisions, however, job growth
started
2013 weaker than in the same period a year ago, suggesting the pace of
hiring
was trending down before March.
The
jobs numbers reflect "a
very sharp slowdown," said Paul Ashworth, chief U.S. economist at
Capital
Economics in Toronto. But, he added, the weak growth may be a more
accurate
reflection of the fragile recovery than the "surprisingly good"
employment numbers notched in January and February.
Friday's
jobs report shows that
talk of an early end to the Federal Reserve's bond-buying programs
might have
been premature. The Journal's Jon Hilsenrath has more on what the jobs
report
means for the Fed.
Some
economists considered that
year-end weakness at odds with the strong jobs numbers registered early
in
2013. March's report may represent something of a payback for the gains
of the
past two months.
Read
the rest of the article at the
Wall Street Journal
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