Michael R. Strain, Columnist

Jobs Report Could Signal a Real Turning Point

Will wages keep going up? The answers to four questions are crucial.

February 2, 2018 at 4:57 PM UTC

Michael R. Strain is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He is director of economic policy studies and Arthur F. Burns Scholar in Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute. He is the author of “The American Dream Is Not Dead: (But Populism Could Kill It).”

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The monthly jobs report is a big event the day it is released, and then is usually quickly forgotten. Given how difficult it is to extract the labor market’s trend from any one month’s set of data, this is how it should be.

But the jobs report for January — released this morning — might be different. It might resonate into the future. Why? Because the data in it show that workers are finally seeing wage growth accelerate.