Steady U. S. Job Growth Sets Stage for Fed to Raise Interest Rates -
By PATRICIA COHENMARCH 10, 2017
A wave of hiring in February — President Trump’s first full month in office — pointed to a strong foundation for the nation’s
economy, providing further evidence for the Federal Reserve that the moment to raise interest rates has come.
“We’ve got people in orientation classes,” Ms. Griffin said, “and they get up
and leave because they’re contacted about another job that might be more money.”
At the same time, a broader measure of unemployment — which includes the millions of Americans who have given up looking for work or who are working part time
but would prefer full-time jobs — dropped to 9.2 percent last month but is still high given how tight the labor market looks otherwise.
Cautioning the Fed against moving too quickly with a rate increase, Elise Gould, an economist at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, noted that, “Workers throughout the economy, including young workers, workers of color,
and low-wage workers, need a chance to make up lost ground on wage growth.”
Many Americans who live outside urban centers also have been excluded from most of the rewards of the recovery.
Although the economic anxiety that helped put Mr. Trump in the White House remains, the official jobless rate is near what the Fed
considers full employment — a threshold where, in theory at least, everyone who wants a job at the going rate can find one.