Steady U. S. Job Growth Sets Stage for Fed to Raise Interest Rates -<br />By PATRICIA COHENMARCH 10, 2017<br />A wave of hiring in February — President Trump’s first full month in office — pointed to a strong foundation for the nation’s<br />economy, providing further evidence for the Federal Reserve that the moment to raise interest rates has come.<br />“We’ve got people in orientation classes,” Ms. Griffin said, “and they get up<br />and leave because they’re contacted about another job that might be more money.”<br />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<br />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.<br />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,<br />and low-wage workers, need a chance to make up lost ground on wage growth.”<br />Many Americans who live outside urban centers also have been excluded from most of the rewards of the recovery.<br />Although the economic anxiety that helped put Mr. Trump in the White House remains, the official jobless rate is near what the Fed<br />considers full employment — a threshold where, in theory at least, everyone who wants a job at the going rate can find one.
