New Jobs Data: 155,000 New Jobs in December, Unemployment Rate Unchanged

A very in-line-with-consensus-estimates jobs report today as the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported 155,000 new payroll jobs in December and an unemployment rate holding steady at 7.8 percent. Now that there's no presidential election for a few years we can perhaps stop seeing the monthly jobs numbers as such a political footballl. What we've got here is an economy that just keeps plugging along unremarkably. Which would be great if the background conditions were great, but in fact background conditions were pretty bad so "plugging along unremarkably" leads to a perpetuation of outcomes in which the long-term unemployment situation will probably keep getting worse. As ever, I exhort people to pay at least as much attention to the revisions to past months' data as to the initial estimate of the most recent month. New information is fun, but accurate information is what matters...