The She-Cession By The Numbers

The January jobs report came out last week from the US Department of Labor. The numbers were both better and worse than expected. They were better, in that the economy added 467,000 new jobs, more than triple Wall Street’s estimate of 150,000. That is and ought to be encouraging as the country continues to struggle through high inflation and a still-depressed job market. The roll-in of omicron was further proof that this pandemic remains ongoing and that market conditions can still rapidly change as the virus ebbs and flows; that we managed to not only stay at work but expand the employed workforce is a testament as much to our resilience as it is to our growing impatience with what is still, in many ways, a wartime economy during a wave of infection that was also both better (less lethal) and worse (vastly more virulent) than expected.