March job growth zoomed: payrolls jumped by 303,000, unemployment drops to 3.8%

Likely that their Q2 budgets get approved around the same time.

I imagine that an interesting sociological topic could be fashion trends and mass hysteria among business elites.

I commented to my wife this past week that I was suddenly contacted by multiple recruiters, seemingly out of nowhere. It had been many many months prior since that had happened.

This links to the actual BLS notification, so thanks for referring to this post!

Here is the BLS link: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/archives/empsit_04052024.ht...

> do these jobs pay

Real wages are up, so yes. (The laggards are technology jobs and some zip codes.)

> anyone who drives an hour a month for Lyft does not count as unemployed

There are multiple unemployment statistics collected. It’s trivial to use the metric that does or doesn’t include that worker.

3.6M Boomers retire per year, 10k per day. 1.8M citizens over the age of 55 die every year, half of which are in the labor force. 4M potential workers turn 18 per year. This is a demographics story, which the Fed is powerless against (from a labor perspective). This labor “shortage” will last at least a decade, if not longer.

It’s also why the Fed is making peace with the neutral rate being closer to 2.5-3%, but they can’t give up yet trying to get to 2% without losing credibility. Powell said they’d cut if the labor market saw signs of weakness, which differs from previous signaling (but is likely a result of discussions behind closed doors, with the Fed coming to a conclusion to focus on full employment over getting control of the last of price instability, for whatever reason).

With that said, central banks have reached terminal rates, and some have started cutting already (Switzerland). The Fed will potentially cut soon, stoking labor uptake. Maybe this pulls more workers in, further pushing down unemployment. Maybe this causes retirements to increase beyond expectations (due to equity re-pricing upward when rates drop, bolstering retirement account balances). We are in uncharted territory.

Defense jobs have gotten goosed in the nuts, too. I'm getting dinged every few hours this week. I know, I know, first world problem, but it's a nice change.

Exactly!

232k would also be a pretty solid number.

> Healthcare growth is also probably at minimum 50% driven by an increase in government spending on entitlements.

Before suggesting 50% is the minimum, perhaps start with some shred of evidence that it’s a significant factor at all?