US Economy New Jobs

The U.S. economy saw its first significant sign of a jobs recovery last month as employers added 162,000 new jobs to payrolls - with about 123,000 of them coming in key private sector industries.

The jobs growth wasn’t strong enough to offset new workers entering the labor force or lower the nation’s unemployment rate, now stuck at 9.7 percent, disappointing some economists who had hoped for slightly larger gains.

But the 162,000 new jobs still represented the largest monthly increase in employment in three years, providing a glimmer of hope that the nation is finally pulling out of the longest and most severe downturn since the Great Depression.

Alan Clayton Matthews, an economist at Northeastern University, said the March numbers follow a pattern of other data showing a slowly healing economy. “This is what gets a self-sustaining recovery going,” he said.

The payroll numbers produced one surprise yesterday: agreement between Democrats and Republicans in Washington, D.C.

Both Christina Roemer, chair of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, and Rep. John Kline (R-Minn.), the top Republican on the U.S. House Education and Labor Committee, described the March data as “welcome” news.

But there the agreement ended.

Roemer warned future growth will be slow and “there will likely be bumps in the road ahead.”

Kline took swipes at Democratic policies he said were producing unsatisfactory growth.

“More than a year after Democrats enacted their budget-busting government stimulus plan, the national unemployment rate remains nearly two percentage points higher than Democrats predicted, and 15 million Americans are still looking for work,” he said in a statement.

U.S. Rep. Barney Frank (D-Newton) shot back that the economy is only now recovering “from the deep Bush recession which President Obama inherited.”