Kamala Harris Overshadows Joe Biden’s First Jobs Day
Her tiebreaking vote on the president’s $1.9 trillion fiscal relief package made the latest data on the U.S. labor market mostly irrelevant.
Tiebreaker.
Photographer: Greg Nash-Pool/Getty Images
It took all of 15 seconds for Vice President Kamala Harris to render mostly irrelevant a data release that has long been considered one of the most important in the world.
The latest read on the U.S. labor market was disappointing, with nonfarm payrolls increasing by just 49,000 in January, falling short of the median estimate of a 105,000 gain in a Bloomberg survey of economists. The revised figure for December was even worse, with the Labor Department now saying that the world’s largest economy lost 227,000 jobs, compared with a decline of 140,000 previously. On its face, the unemployment rate looks a lot better, at 6.3% from 6.7% previously, but that’s in part because the labor force participation rate is sliding lower again.