Megan McArdle, Bloomberg:
The latest jobs report is great news. There were 288,000 new jobs in June, with the unemployment rate dropping to 6.1 percent. Don’t get me wrong: Labor force participation is still down from 2007, and we need a lot more of these months to get back to where we were. But still, this is very happy news for anyone who has been concerned about the state of America’s job market — which should be everyone….
These jobs numbers are good. Maybe not as good as we wish they were, but good. And that means that the economy is probably doing all right as well.
Louis Woodhill, Forbes:
… while total employment (BLS Household Survey) increased by 407,000 in June, the number of people working part time increased by 1,115,000. This means that the number of full-time workers actually fell by 708,000.
Netting everything out, the number of full-time-equivalent* (FTE) jobs fell by 151,000 during June. Because our working-age population is growing, America moved 265,000 FTE jobs farther away from full employment during the month, bringing our total FTE jobs shortfall to 15.1 million. This is the highest such number seen since last December….
During a recovery, the nation is supposed to recover what it lost during the preceding recession, but America has 1.7 million fewer FTE jobs today than it had in November 2007. In the meantime, our adult population has grown by 14.7 million.
