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March 06, 2015 at 09:50 AM
The February jobs report the Labor Department released Friday is further confirmation that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, with economist Mohamed El-Erian much smitten by data that many others find unsightly.
In an interview with Bloomberg TV, the chief economic advisor to Allianz called it a “wow jobs report,” even as his Bloomberg interlocutor Betty Liu expressed despondency about stagnating wage growth.
Other analyses, particularly of a conservative hue, were apt to focus on the labor force participation numbers, which continue to hover at levels from the 1970s era, before women and boomers filled labor force ranks in large numbers.
But El-Erian called both wage growth and labor force participation mere “blemishes” that should not obscure the key takeaway that this is the 12th consecutive month of more than 200,000 added jobs.
That this now yearlong momentum in jobs continued amid “a relentlessly strong dollar and bad weather” makes the feat of a three-month employment moving average of almost 290,000 all the more remarkable in El-Erian’s eyes.
The Allianz economic advisor views the jobs expansion as highly significant from a policy point of view because it opens the “way for a rate hike by or at the September meeting” of the Fed’s rate-setting body, the Federal Open Markets Committee (FOMC).
U.S. monetary policy has been stuck at near-zero rates for more than six years now, since the failure of Lehman Brothers set off the global financial crisis.
