Economy Watch: Mixed Signals From Jobs Report; Trade Gap Narrows $1.5B
At only 88,000 new jobs created, March's 2013 increase fell short of the 12-month trailing average of 169,000; intermodal rail traffic ticked up 0.5 percent last month.
By Dees Stribling, Contributing Editor
March’s jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics was disappointing for a number of reasons, beyond mere lackluster job growth for the month itself. During the 12 months before March, for instance, the economy created an average of 169,000 jobs a month, a so-so performance, but March 2013’s net increase of 88,000 didn’t rise to even that level of mediocrity.
One culprit was retail employment, which lost 24,000 jobs in March, after gaining an average of 32,000 per month during the prior six months (all figures are seasonally adjusted, so the holiday season didn’t account for the growth). Categories sustaining the heaviest losses were clothing and clothing accessories (down 15,000 jobs), building material and garden supply stores (10,000), and electronics and appliance stores (6,000).
The official unemployment rate did tick down 0.1 percentage points in March to 7.6 percent, the lowest level since the rate began heading up in 2009. But the recent improvement was mainly a function of people leaving the workforce. The BLS said that the civilian labor force declined by 496,000 over the month, and the labor force participation rate decreased by 0.2 percentage points to 63.3 percent.
There were a handful of positives in the jobs report, however. The number of the long-term unemployed fell to 4.61 million in March, compared with 4.8 million in February. By the BLS definition, the category includes those who have been out of work for at least 27 weeks but are still looking for a job. Long-term unemployed accounted for 39.6 percent of all unemployed people last month.
In the public sector, only the U.S. Postal Service lost employees in March. In fact, state and local governments added a net of 7,000 positions during the month, contrary to recent trends in hiring. Sequestration promises more job cuts at the federal level, but the impact hasn’t been fully felt yet.
More Mixed Signals
In other economic indicators reported on Friday, U.S. exports totaled $186 billion in February, while imports were $228.9 billion, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce. That resulted in a trade deficit of $43 billion, down from $44.5 billion in January.
The Association of American Railroads said that intermodal traffic in March 2013 totaled about 933,200 containers and trailers, up 0.5 percent compared to March 2012. Carloads originated in March 2013 totaled about 1.117 million, down 0.5 percent, but those shipments increased 3.4 percent when coal and grain are excluded. Rail traffic continues to mirror the wider economy: not terrible, but not that great, either.
Over the weekend, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. reported the fifth bank failure of the year, Gold Canyon Bank in Gold Canyon, Ariz., which is east of metro Phoenix. At this rate, 2013 will be a slow year for bank failures. If so, it will fit the pattern of steadily declining bank failures during the past three years. Fifty-one banks went belly up in 2012, as did 91 in 2011. The wave of bank failures crested at 157 in 2010.
Wall Street was down on Friday after the release of the jobs numbers, but not precipitously so. The Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 40.86 points, or 0.28 percent, while the S&P 500 lost 0.43 percent and the Nasdaq was off 0.65 percent.
