The Employment Report Rocks

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today that March unemployment dropped to 4.4% from 4.5% in February, and that 180,000 new jobs were created.

The report comes after ADP’s National employment report Wednesday had come in at only 101,000 additional non-government jobs (157,000 of BLS’s official 180,000 pickup were non-governmental), and advance analysts’ estimates of a 135,000-job pickup.

It’s hard to throw cold water on good news like this, but it doesn’t mean that the Associated Press didn’t try to do just that:

Employers ramped up hiring in March, driving the unemployment rate down to 4.4 percent, matching a five-year low. It was a surprisingly strong performance in an economy that has otherwise shown signs of sluggishness recently.

The new snapshot, released by the Labor Department on Friday, also showed that employers boosted their payrolls by a strong 180,000 in March, the most since December. Workers’ also saw their paychecks get bigger. The fresh figures suggested that companies are not feeling a need to dramatically clamp down on hiring in the face of the slower overall economic activity and the deep housing slump.

Y’know, AP, it just may be that:

• The “signs of sluggishness” aren’t that convincing.
• Economic activity might not going “slower” as much as thought.
• The “deep” housing slump may have already played out (this is different from the mortgage industry’s problems with subprime loans, which may [emphasis MAY] not have as much of an effect on home prices or new home construction as some believe). News from the housing sector earlier in the week was pretty good, and pushed the stock market into what is turning out to be a pretty good week on Wall Street.

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UPDATE: Prior month revisions weren’t as great as they have been (previously commented on here), but they were still positive, as 16,000 jobs were added to both January’s and February’s previously reported numbers.