The September jobs numbers are the 2018 United States economy in a nutshell: Even when an economic report is bad these days, it’s actually pretty good.
When the latest numbers first were broadcast at 8:30 a.m. Friday, it looked like a big disappointment. Employers added only 134,000 jobs to their payrolls last month, well below the levels of recent months and well below what forecasters had projected.
But even apart from the usual warnings about statistical error and randomness (the true rate of job creation could turn out to be either much higher or much lower), the numbers are a good bit better than that single data point suggests.
There’s reason to think that Hurricane Florence temporarily depressed the numbers by taking many hourly workers off the payrolls in the Carolinas. The number of leisure and hospitality jobs fell by 17,000, and retail jobs by 20,000 — both sectors prone to be affected.
And revisions to previous months’ numbers were positive, so there was more momentum heading into September than it had seemed. August was already reported to be strong, but now looks to have been a blockbuster month for job creation — the previously reported 201,000 jobs added has been revised up to 270,000.
In other words, if you simply took those 69,000 extra jobs created in August and credit them to September, suddenly you would have two months of very steady job creation at a high rate.
And that’s not even mentioning the drop in the unemployment rate to 3.7 percent, from 3.9 percent. That’s the lowest level during the current economic expansion. And lower than in the 1990s boom.
To find the last time the jobless rate was lower, you have to go back to when Richard Nixon was in the White House, when men had only recently walked on the moon, and when the Beatles were still together.
The even better news is that the last time the jobless rate was this low, at the end of 1969, it was already fueling high inflation. Consumer prices rose 5.9 percent that year. Currently, that measure is 2.7 percent.
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