The labor market at long last posted a month of job creation that’s immune to second guessing, or so it seems. Nonfarm payrolls rose by 162,000 in March, the Labor Department reported this morning. That’s the biggest monthly advance in three years and the first convincing evidence since the recession began more than two years ago that the job market is recovering.
Monthly Archives: April 2010
INITIAL JOBLESS CLAIMS FALL AGAIN
After a rocky period in February, the downtrend in initial jobless claims seems to be back on track, as today’s
update suggests. Are we setting ourselves up for disappointment? Perhaps not, although tomorrow’s monthly report on nonfarm payrolls will shed some light on whether we’re being fooled again.
FIRST QUARTER RALLY
March was generally kind to risk exposures. The main exceptions were commodities overall, foreign government bonds in developed markets and investment-grade U.S. bonds. But the slippage in that trio was more than offset elsewhere in the capital markets. As a result, our passive benchmark of the major asset classes—the Global Market Index (GMI)—rose by handsome 3.4% last month. That’s the highest monthly performance since last September’s 3.5% gain.