244k new jobs in April!
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703992704576306843829385166.html
If you look at the BLS statistics, I find the Employment-Population Ratio quite interesting. It used to be about 62-63% from 2001 to 2008 and now stands at 58.5% and didn't really move much for the last year and a half. 4% of the American population are about 12 million people, meaning virtually all of the currently registered unemployed people would have to find a job to get back to the usual level as a lot of people have left the labor market for now.
If you consider that 12 million people or so need a job to get back to the usual level of employment, adding 244k jobs doesn't seem that impressive. And based on the BLS statistics, the American labor force grows by 100k+ persons each month, so the net gain is even less.
It's really not impressive by any standard other than relative to what we had in the last few years. That's about the average we had during Clinton's 8 years. The only good thing about it is that it's always better to have positive momentum than to not have it, but hopefully this positive momentum would amount to a lot more than this.
And the WSJ article says that government is still shedding jobs, so it's not a good time to be a teacher. Guess you'll have to stay in Korea a bit longer, Tim.
Economic recovery: tainted. FUCK YOU TIM.