It’s a little secret of the news business that for some anticipated events, like a Supreme Court decision or the death of a prominent figure, we pre-write much of an article or different versions of them so that we can publish quickly once news occurs.
Which is why there is now a trashed draft of this article explaining how the April jobs numbers show what a hyper-speed economic recovery looks like. It was completely wrong.
Employers added only 266,000 jobs last month, the government reported Friday morning, not the million or so that forecasters expected. The unemployment rate actually edged up, to 6.1 percent.
The details of the new numbers are messy. Temporary employment fell sharply (down 111,000 jobs), while hiring in the leisure and hospitality sector was robust (up 331,000 jobs). It will take time to figure out why so many mainstream forecasts were so wrong — the modest job creation is out of whack with what other indicators have suggested — and whether some part of the weak results is more statistical aberration than reality.
variety of other reasons: having to care for children whose classes are remote; fearing the coronavirus; reconsidering their careers.
Back in 2010, the Obama administration introduced one of the more unfortunate economic messaging concepts of recent decades, announcing that a “Recovery Summer” was underway. It became a punchline, because while the economy was expanding, Americans were still far worse off than they’d been before the 2008 recession, and improvement was coming very slowly.
That’s one outcome the Biden administration desperately wants to avoid.