March employment

This morning's news from the BLS on employment was good news: payrolls were up by 162,000. So the economy is finally adding jobs rather than losing them. However, the not-so-good news is that 48,000 of those jobs were temporary government jobs: census workers. And the job growth was less than economist predicted. According the Wall Street Journal, "Economists polled by Dow Jones Newswires were expecting payrolls to rise by an even higher 200,000." As the New York Times notes:

The economy must create 100,000 jobs each month just to absorb new entrants into the labor force, according to many projections. That sustained level of growth may not come until later this year, economists said, making pervasive unemployment a virtual certainty for some time to come.

However, the really bad news is that number of involuntary underemployed (part time for economic reasons) increased dramatically in March after stabilizing at the end of last year. This could be a function of more people returning to the labor force. But I really would like to see the involuntary underemployed number start going down -- that would be a real sign of recovery.