Jobs to Recover, but Job Statistics to Get Worse

Economists both in and outside of the White House have predicted that jobs will be making a recovery that, while slow and steady, is nonetheless a cause for optimism regarding the country’s overall economic future.

During a CNN interview on Saturday, White House economic advisor Larry Summers said that, as far as job losses are concerned, the worst is over and that he expects businesses to begin accelerating hiring over the next few months. Summers, though, tempered the news with a reminder that a recovery will still take a long time to fully realize.

Former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan, in a separate talk with ABC News, said that the recovery, overall, is building momentum into a self-reinforcing cycle. While he acknowledged that a “statistical aberration” is possible, he said that the probability that the U.S. economy stalling have fallen very significantly over the last two months.

March saw some 162,000 new jobs being created, the highest figure in the past three years, of which 48,000 were temporary positions for federal census workers. Buoyed, perhaps, by this news, the Dow Jones Industrial Average has been inching closer and closer to 11,000 as of press time.

Despite job growth, unemployment stubbornly remains at 9.7 percent, a figure that could remain high, or even grow, despite increasing job opportunities. This is because, according to the Washington Post, the jobless rate only counts those actively looking for work. It’s assumed that, since the recession began, a number of people simply stopped looking after a while, thus taking themselves out of the calculations. Should jobs begin to make a steady recovery, those that had previously given up may begin actively looking for work again, thus placing themselves back into the equation. Further, even if jobs are growing, there still remains an average of 5.4 job-seekers per opening.