Don LeeContact Reporter
For the last two years, America’s job-creation machine has been like “The Little Engine That Could,” chugging ahead with “I think I can, I think I can” regardless of headwinds at home or abroad.
The nation added 3 million jobs in 2014, making up all the ground lost in the Great Recession, and then piled on another 2.7 million jobs last year. All while the broader economy, as measured by the gross domestic product, grew at a relatively lackluster pace.
But the January jobs report, released Friday, suggests that the ever-dependable locomotive for the U.S. economy has encountered a hill that slowed it sharply.
The question now is whether it is just moving through an unusually steep patch or has finally met a hill it cannot conquer. The answer probably won’t be known for a couple of months, but Friday’s report has further clouded the outlook for investors and the Federal Reserve’s interest rate policy.
The Labor Department said that employers added just 151,000 jobs last month, down from an average monthly gain of 283,000 in the fourth quarter of last year.
Economists caution that one can’t make too much of a single month’s data, especially in the winter when weather can skew payroll statistics. Unseasonably warm temperatures in December probably inflated hiring that month in construction, for example.
https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-jobs-report-20160205-story.html