US Added More Than 900K Jobs in March, Blowing Past Estimates

The U.S. added 916,000 jobs in March, far above the expectations for 675,000. The unemployment rate edged down to 6% from 6.2%. 

The gains were led by leisure and hospitality, public and private education, and construction. 

The coronavirus pandemic-hit leisure and hospitality sector added a whopping 280,000 jobs.

With increased vaccination rates, macroeconomic uncertainty for the U.S. labor market is decreasing. While institutions have been providing the largest inflows to high-yield assets like bitcoin recently, the decrease in uncertainty could bode well for retail investors in digital assets. 

While many investors treat bitcoin as a hedge against inflation and in some cases a hedge against macroeconomic uncertainty, a recent survey of European households by an economics professor at the University of Texas, Olivier Coibion, and four other economists showed that households reduced their share of assets allocated to crypto by 0.5 percentage points during times of elevated macroeconomic uncertainty. 

One notable difference between economic recovery in a pandemic-induced recession and recovery in previous recessions is the large fraction of unemployment caused by temporary layoffs, said Robert Hall, an economics professor at Stanford University. 

“In the previous recessions, the unemployed on temporary layoffs were a tiny fraction of all the unemployed,” Hall said. “The distinction is important because the unemployed on temporary layoffs typically have a much higher rate of returning to employment than the other unemployed.”