Some Good Jobs News The black jobless rate falls to its lowest ever in the Labor statistics.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/some-good-jobs-news-1515197365
Friday’s Labor Department report on the December jobs market was mostly ho-hum, with the economy creating 148,000 net new jobs and the unemployment rate staying flat at a low 4.1%. But one more hopeful figure leapt out at us and a few others: The unemployment rate for black Americans fell to its lowest rate ever at 6.8%.
That’s right. The jobless rate for African-Americans hasn’t been lower since 1972, the earliest date we could find in the Bureau of Labor Statistics data tables. The jobless rate for blacks has always been substantially higher than for whites, and it tends to fall faster later in the economic cycle as growth picks up steam. The black jobless rate fell into the 7%-8% range in 1999-2000, before the dot-com bubble burst, and briefly in 2007 before the financial panic. But it climbed back to as high as 16.8% in 2010 before a long, slow decline as the economy recovered.
The rate has fallen especially fast the last couple of years, and in December fell another 0.4 percentage points. That big a fall might be a statistical anomaly that bounces back up in future months, but the downward trend is as clear as the political and economic message: Get the economy growing faster, and everyone will benefit.
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