Today’s Jobs Report Provides Key Economic Answers [AUDIO]

A new employment report that’s being released by the U.S. Labor Department today will be watched very carefully.

If job growth is below expectations again for April – similar to the report last month for March – some analysts fear it could signal the economic recovery is in serious trouble.

Pat O’Keefe, Director of Economic Research at JH Cohn isn’t among them.

O’Keefe says he’s expecting better news than many other analysts – somewhere around a net gain of 200 thousand jobs, but “not all of that gain will be in the April number- part of it I think will be in an upward adjustment of the unexpectedly low March number.”

He says if we look at this in just a little bit longer perspective we’ll see “what the United states has experienced for the better part of 2 years now is a slow growth jobs recovery – we’ve been averaging about 150 thousand net new jobs per month, and therefore the overall condition of the labor market remains relatively soft…even if today’s report is very good it would be just another mediocre report in the middle of a very modest jobs recovery.”

O’Keefe adds it’s important to keep in mind that monthly data “is subject to a number of statistical limitations and we see that in the subsequent months – the estimates are typically adjusted…we’re better off looking at, for example, a 3 month average, so that we tease out any of the gyrations that may be unique to a particular month.”

He also points out job gains in this recovery have been uneven – concentrated in a relatively small number of industries – including professional and technical services , temporary help, and extraction industries – like mining, and logging and oil, and at the end of the day “we have a recovery in which the jockey is sitting on a burro- when we wish we were riding a thoroughbred.”