Job seekers at an Atlanta Technical College job fair (Bob Andres/Atlanta Journal-Constitution/AP)As you'd expect, responses to the news that the economy gained zero jobs last month have been pretty universally downbeat. Still, there are some valuable insights out there, that go beyond the woeful top-line numbers. Here are a few of the more interesting ones:
• White House economics adviser Gene Sperling: "We have to do something on job growth now and we have to do something more urgently, and we cannot allow the normal politics and partisanship to stand in the way of what is a clear need for a real boost to job growth in the economy right now."
That might sound like stating the obvious. But the tone of Sperling's comments, made during an interview with Bloomberg TV, suggests a much greater urgency than we've generally heard from the White House during the jobs crisis. Could that be a sign that President Obama's new jobs ideas, to be laid out in a speech next week, will finally be ambitious enough to match the scale of the problem?
• Mohamed el-Erian, the CEO of PIMCO, the world's largest bond-trading firm, on whether the news increases the chances that we're slipping back into a recession: "Yes, I had a probability between one-third and one-half. I think this number and the compositional elements will tend to increase those numbers."
El-Erian, also speaking to Bloomberg TV, calls the report "worrying," adding "hopefully, it will ring alarm bells in Washington." And he calls the beleaguered housing sector "critical" to the health of the economy.
• Gary Burtless of the Brookings Institution points out in a statement that the comparative--and surprising--infrequency of layoffs in the battered labor market is a troubling sign of weakness. The problem isn't that people are being let go, he notes--it's the "anemic pace of hiring."
• Dean Baker, of the liberal Center for Economic and Policy Research, picks out a few bright spots from a larger picture he acknowledges is "bleak."
Baker notes that a strike by Verizon employees accounted for 45,000 lost private sector jobs last month. Without that, we'd have seen a gain of 45,000 jobs--still an awful showing, but not quite as eye-catching as the zero figure.
Baker also writes: "Workers over age 55 accounted 203,000 of the 311,000 increase in jobs reported in the household survey. Over the last year employment of men over age 55 increased by 641,000 or 4.5 percent. By contrast, employment among men between the ages of 34 and 44 fell by 377,000, a drop of 2.3 percent."
And he notes that unemployment in the construction sector is down to 13.5 percent--still high, but better than the 17 percent we saw a year ago. In manufacturing, the figure is 8.9 percent--slightly below the overall figure of 9.1 percent, and further evidence that, as Mark Twain might say, reports of the death of U.S. manufacturing have been exaggerated.
• The National Employment Law Project, a labor-backed group, noticed in a statement that unemployment figures by race are moving in opposite directions. The rate for African-Americans rose last month to 16.7 percent, from 15.9 percent. It's now more than double the rate for whites, which fell slightly to 8 percent.
Along similar lines, Baker observes the ratio of employment to population for African-American teens fell last month to 13 percent, a new low.
• And of course, the markets have rendered their own glum verdict on the bad employment news.
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