Justin Lahart

Yeah, a couple of things happened.

There was a strike at Kaiser Permanente, and that did knock several thousand jobs off of health care employment.

Also, there was a really outsized gain in health care in January.

So some of this was a give back to that.

And some people think that the data may just be a little more volatile than it used to be.

But, you know, overall, this is a very weak report.

Construction shedding jobs, manufacturing shedding jobs, information shedding jobs, leisure and hospitality shedding.

I mean, it was really, you know, just not a good report at all.

Yeah, I mean, so the unemployment rate, it went up to 4.4%.

That's still relatively low.

One thing that's going on here is that we don't really have like a strong sense of how many jobs the economy needs to add each month to keep unemployment rates steady anymore.

And that's because with immigration restrictions, the population just isn't growing like it used to, especially the working age population.

So you may just not need to create as many jobs to keep up with population growth as we did before.

This month's Fed meeting, you wouldn't really expect to see any action on interest rates.

They'd like to see more than one report to give them a direction of where things are going, right?

But it does open up the possibility of more rate cuts this year.

Thanks.

I think because of what they had seen over the past several months, which was very, very, very slow job growth.

And also, we just don't expect to see very high job growth these days because we have such lower immigration to the country and the supply of workers is much lower than it was before.

I mean, it's mostly health care and social services.