Jobs day is usually a frenzy of digging through the data for either signs of impending doom or glimmers of hope. But there wasn't a lot to get really excited or really upset about in the May jobs report.
And that may be good news. Or as Douglas Holtz-Eakin, former director of the CBO and president of the right-leaning American Action Forum, tweeted Friday:
This is finally as exciting as watching paint dry. We've been waiting years for this day. #jobs
— Douglas Holtz-Eakin (@djheakin) June 6, 2014
This is not to say the job market has fully recovered, or even that it's looking fantastic — as long as more than one-third of the unemployed have been out of work for six months or more, things will still look pretty ugly.
But this is the fourth straight month of payrolls growth of over 200,000, and it doesn't bring with it any heavy baggage of ugly news, like a still-shrinking labor force participation rate (though that rate is troublingly low). That a relatively good jobs report has become ho-hum is a big change from just a year or two ago.
