It’s Jobs Friday again and it’s another banger from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics: 353,000 people added to payrolls, the unemployment rate remains at a super-low 3.7%, and wages are up a sizzling 4.5%.

“If the dominant labor market narrative in 2023 was slow and steady moderation, then 2024 began fast and furious,” wrote Nick Bunker, North American economic research director for Indeed’s Hiring Lab. “Employment gains not only blew past expectations in January, but a host of revisions to 2023 data shows last year was slightly stronger than initially believed.”

There’s been a lot of talk in the last year about the difficulty of bringing in the US economy for a “soft landing” after the storm of the pandemic and the recession that came with it. But progress towards that goal has been so smooth that it seems ho-hum to the folks at the BLS who put together the news release accompanying the jobs report.

The unemployment rate, which has been below 4% for more than two years straight, is at 3.7% “for the third month in a row.” The number of long-term unemployed was “little changed” from December. The labor force participation rate and the employment-population rate, measures of how many Americans either have a job or are looking for one, were respectively “unchanged” and “little changed.”

Jay Powell can sit back and relax

Though a lot of people were hoping that the Federal Reserve would start two decade-high interest rates sooner rather than later this year, there’s nothing in the jobs report that suggests that the Fed will be in any sort of rush. As long as inflation — down by far, but not down far enough — isn’t at the 2% figure that Jay Powell & Co. are looking for, and the job market keeps on humming, those cuts still don’t look like they’ll be coming anytime soon.

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