Weekly Wrap: January jobs report
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Weekly Wrap: January jobs report
Cardiff Garcia from the blog FT Alphaville and Marketplace New York Bureau Chief Heidi Moore discuss the world of Wall Street and beyond.
On the January jobs report:
Heidi Moore: The thing is, these numbers are terrific, but we have to make sure that they don’t take us away from the core numbers that are at the fault of what’s going on in the economy, which is long-term unemployment. And that is not changing. So it’s great to get these good numbers — we’re seeing a lot more baby boomers employed, we’re seeing a lot more management positions, we’re seeing white-collar jobs — but if we don’t address long-term unemployment, then we’ll have wasted this whole opportunity to get this right.
Cardiff Garcia: There’s good reason to be relieved about this report — all the underlying details were good. Finally, the unemployment rate is dropping for the right reason — more people are employed. But at the same time, yeah, you still need to add those caveats because the simple fact is we need many more months like this. We need like 10 to 20 more months of reports like this before we really start to address this sort of tragic and structural unemployment problem in the country.
For more analysis, listen to the full audio above.
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