Unemployment Hitting a Ten-Year Low at 4.4 Percent
It might be safe to say that this is one time in American history where unemployment hitting a ten-year low at 4.4 percent —even just on the surface— doesn’t provide many people with any real sense of relief. While people are cautiously optimistic, new graduates have a lot to smile about in terms of the opportunities available in the job market.
This 4.4 percent is a far cry from numbers in the 2008 recession which saw an unemployment rate as high as 10 percent, April’s report has also indicated an addition of 211,000 jobs. Numbers like these are way off from the twilight of the Bush era (08-09) when the US was sometimes hemorrhaging a half million to close to a million jobs every month. Still, the transition of power between Barack Obama to Donald Trump represents the brief period in which it can be hard to establish who it is exactly that’s responsible for whatever employment gains we see in the US right now.
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Are Trump and the month's optimistic jobs report linked? Though the lion's share of economists believe that the January's jobs report was predicated entirely on the work of the Obama administration, that didn’t stop Trump from laying claim to them. Job reports from February and March are on paper attributed to the Trump administration, but there seems to be some debate regarding just how much the optimistic ‘600,000’ jobs added is related to the state of the global economy versus Trump's promise to deregulate and lower taxes.
In an article by CNN Money, Michael Arone, the chief investment strategist at State Street Global Advisors alluded to this when he said that increasing employment is tied way more to “a global growth trade than it is on the optimism regarding the Trump administration's policies.” Even though the Democrats didn’t always have his back, the global economy currently being in a good place (a long term effort) might just have a lot more to do with Obama rather than the Trump related efforts.
Point being, what it is that Trump’s global and domestic economic policies will yield remains to be seen. Yes, the jobs report is optimistic, but the Trump administration's economic policies haven’t sunk in enough for that optimism to outweigh fear of the damage a large scale political scandal, millions of people losing their health care will do or tough talk about isolationism.