Matt Grossman

The jobs report does give them some help, though.

Well, it was a really good month for the healthcare sector.

In part, that wasn't a surprise because February had been a down month for that sector, mostly because there was a big strike.

There was good job growth and leisure and hospitality.

It was also a pretty good month for trades like construction and manufacturing.

So the gains were pretty broad.

There were some declines in government payrolls, especially for the federal government.

Yeah, this is a big story that economists are looking at when you zoom out a bit from the month-to-month numbers.

A couple years ago, when the economy and the labor force were in full boom mode, we were adding hundreds of thousands of jobs most months.

In the past few months, given that immigration has slowed down so much,

the economy now no longer needs to create nearly as many jobs to kind of hold steady.

So that's a decent sign for people who are here looking for work because maybe there are fewer people that you're competing against for those jobs.

On the other hand, it means the economy probably isn't growing as much because there's only so much economic activity that a kind of steady or shrinking labor force can produce.

The data we got today probably doesn't tell us much about how the war in Iran was affecting the economy.

The numbers really reflect the state of the job market in the second week of March.

At that point, the war had only been on for 10 or 15 days or so.

Economists at the Fed and the policymakers there still have a lot of questions about how the war is going to affect the economy.

The jobs report does give them some help, though, because if this had been a really bad report, they might have felt pressure to help cushion the labor market by potentially reducing rates at the same time that high inflation is still a concern for them.

Now that they saw solid job growth in March, they can probably put that to one side and kind of wait and see whether the war is going to have an impact and whether they can make any more progress on inflation.

Thanks.