The newly released employment report for February is expected to show strong growth in both wages and jobs, signaling that the economy's slower growth is just another speed bump on the road, and not the sign of worse things to come, like say, a recession.
As a matter of fact, the economy was expected to have at least 180,000 new jobs in February, which is directly equivalent to unemployment dropping to a rate of 3.9 percent or a tenth of its previous number. Of course, the number is well below the added jobs last January, which amounts all in all to 304,000. Either way, economists still see it as a sign of clear growth and is definitely one to be taken notice of. Furthermore, Wage growth is expected to strengthen, rising 0.3 percent, up from January's 0.1 percent.
According to Luke Tilley, who's the chief economist at Wilmington Trust, "Jobs growth is the single best indicator of how the economy is doing. It shows how many people are being added to payrolls. It tells you much people are being paid, and also any job that is added is a sign of the strength of a company's order book and their prospects going forward." Per Tilley, a total of 200,000 jobs should be added.
A slowdown in growth
Presently, the first quarter is seemingly much slower than the fourth one, yet economists are still frustrated over its lack of released data. Take, for example, retail sales for January have only released this February, which is late than normal. After the sharp drop in retail sales last December, those numbers are important, yet they were released late.
Michael Gapen, who's the chief US economist at Barclays, said, "We expect 200,000 [jobs], a little stronger than consensus. The view is that job growth should slow because economic activity is starting to slow. We don't think 750,000 jobs over the last three months of the year is the trend. We do think things will slow down to 175,000 in the coming months. We're thinking growth slows from the 2.5 that we saw in the fourth quarter to about 2 percent at the end of the year."
Despite this slowdown in the economy and job market however, economists are still optimistic that the country can push through, and can easily avoid the predicted recession that will supposedly come later this year.
