Liam Denning, Columnist

Nonplussed by Payrolls? Try the Oil Business

Hiring data suggest the industry's recovery continues -- but keep an eye on costs.

April 7, 2017 at 4:39 PM UTC

Liam Denning is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering energy. A former banker, he edited the Wall Street Journal’s Heard on the Street column and wrote the Financial Times’s Lex column.

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Friday's U.S. payroll numbers were a damp squib -- but not in the oil business.

The number of people employed in oil and gas extraction (as the Bureau of Labor Statistics classifies them) went up in March, racking up the first back-to-back monthly job gain since October 2014, just before the oil crash began in earnest.