Matthew C Klein, Columnist

Don’t Get Too Excited About Today’s Jobs Data

The latest employment data merely confirm that things havenât been getting worse.

July 5, 2013 at 4:24 PM UTC

Matthew C. Klein writes for Bloomberg View about the economy and financial markets. He previously wrote for the Economist magazine and its economics blog, Free Exchange. Before that, Klein was a research associate at the Council on Foreign Relations, where he spent more than two years studying the history of the Federal Reserve and the intellectual history of monetary economics for an upcoming book by Sebastian Mallaby. He also worked at Bridgewater Associates, where he studied the economies of Central and Eastern Europe and advised institutional investors on asset-liability management. Klein has a bachelor's degree in history from Yale University. Originally from Chicago, he lives in New York.

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The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that 195,000 jobs were added last month -- significantly better than the consensus forecast of economists (165,000). Another 70,000 jobs were added in March and April thanks to revisions. While the news isn't bad, we shouldn't be calling it "good," either. Some perspective is in order.

Remember above all else this analysis from the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, which looks at the impact of aging and slowing population growth to determine how many jobs are needed to return to full employment. These economists calculate that it would take four more years of job gains at the current pace of 195,000 per month to completely close the gap that began opening at the end of 2007.