Job Numbers Are a Good Sign But Not a Victory Flag
The road to a durable economic recovery still has a lot of twists and turns left.
Don’t celebrate yet.
Photographer: Mark Thompson/Getty Images
Although the better-than-expected U.S. employment numbers that came out on Thursday give reason for optimism, it is far too early to declare victory over the threat of further economic damage. Yes, the jobs report and other data released last week illustrated the kind of impressive across-the-board recovery that the economy is capable of. But the durability of this much-needed recovery — and, with that, the sustainable recovery of the global economy — is unlikely to be firmly established without a few more iterations in the historically tricky process of learning how best to live with Covid-19.
The surprisingly strong jobs report for June followed what many others and I felt had been the biggest data surprise ever witnessed by economists and Wall Street analysts — the previous month’s report.