The headline number from this morning's unemployment report was a disappointment: The economy created only 88,000 jobs in March, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Over the past three months, we had added an average of 168,000 jobs per month, so this morning's figure is less than half of that. In February, we added 268,000 jobs.
It was the worst month for new hiring in a year and a half. Many expected the federal sequester to take a big bite, but an even larger factor was that the retail sector shedded 24,000 jobs, after having added an average of 36,000 jobs per month over the previous six months.
Still, the unemployment rate ticked down, from 7.7 percent to 7.6 percent. That's primarily the result of two factors. First, the number of jobs added in both January and February were revised upward, meaning we added a total of 69,000 jobs from those months. Secondly, an unexpectedly large number of people left the workforce in March, nearly 500,000 people. That helps shrink the percentage of people considered unemployed.
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