I'm a bit slow here (I'm traveling), but the bad jobs story for December might be even worse than is being reported. The reason is that the imputation for jobs created by new firms not included in the survey is likely overstating job growth.
In December, this imputation added 66,000 jobs. In November it added 51,000. By comparison, in the same two months of 2006 the imputation added 64,000 and 36,000 jobs for these months. We now know that those imputations for last year were about 25,000 too high. With the economy almost certainly growing more slowly this year than the last, it is likely that the overstatement is even larger this year.
As always, you can get the full jobs story here.
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