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Jobs gain in January partly due to warm winter in U.S.
Howard Richman, 2/5/2012

President Obama received some good news when the January jobs and unemployment numbers came in better than economists expected. But the numbers were not nearly as good as they seemed. They were largely the result of an incorrect seasonal adjustment. Action Forex, a weekly Internet publication of Wells Fargo, makes this point:

The employment report for January showed that 243,000 jobs were added with the unemployment rate declining slightly to 8.3 percent. The details of the report however, suggest that unseasonably warm weather may be playing a role in the stronger job gains....

Unseasonably warm weather may be helping boost the headline employment numbers. Typically, this time of year, around 430K workers report that they are unable to work, a spike that coincides with winter weather. The number of workers reporting that they are unable to work in January fell by more than 200K below this average. We remain somewhat skeptical that job growth in excess of 200K per month will continue over the near term.

Still, Wells Fargo sees these jobs numbers as a positive sign. They write:

As a result of this week's data we have revised our GDP forecast for the Q1 to 1.4 percent and 1.9 percent for 2012. The employment report led to a slight upward revision to our employment outlook for the year. We now expect that an average of 155K jobs per month will be added this year.

If the economy grows at only a 2% rate in 2012, that would continue the current high unemployment, declining median income, economic stagnation -- the persistent depression that is the lot of trade deficit countries, as predicted by John Maynard Keynes.