There was a reasonably positive jobs report out this morning from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which reported that the economy added 165,000 jobs in the month of April. That's a "new normal" figure; the average number of jobs added for the prior 12 months was 169,000 per month.
But the unemployment rate ticked down from 7.6 percent to 7.5 percent, in large part because of revisions to previous reports. March, which was originally reported as creating 88,000 jobs, has been revised upward to 138,000, and February's number has been revised from 268,000 to 332,000.
That means that February was the best month for new hiring since June 2010, when the economy added 521,000 jobs. And aside from that single outlying month, you have to go all the way back to December 2005 - when we added 335,000 jobs - to find another month that was better for hiring than February 2013.
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