March Unemploymentzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Arguably the least important jobs report of our lifetimes. The Fed is bent on ending stimulus by the end of this year and it’s hard to picture a jobs number that would have curtailed (or sped up) the pace of tapering.

Anyway, here are the numbers:

Headline unemployment rate unchanged at 6.7%.

192,000 jobs added in March, which was below the consensus (200k).

The entire gain of 192k was private sector workers – state, local and federal are still a net neutral or negative.

That February report that everyone whined about was revised higher by 37k jobs to 197,000 – the average monthly BLS report is revised something like seven times and by a wide margin, which renders the initial release of data (like today) almost completely meaningless. But still we play along.

The long-term unemployed didn’t budge – 3.7 million people out of work for over half a year.

Average hourly earnings were unchanged, a slight miss versus expectations.

Not much to talk about, as prominent Fed watchers will tell us throughout the course of the day, nothing here will change what the FOMC was already set on course to do.