construction. when you take into account though that some of these might have been seasonal jobs, jared, these are definitely signs that an economic recovery is solidifying but signs are really a long way off though from an actual economic recovery, correct? right. i wrote something this morning about the jobs report called the good, the bad, and the ugly. the good is that we do have a bit of a positive trend behind us as you mentioned in your introduction, thomas. the bad is that some of these jobs, by the way, of those transportation jobs, about 40,000 were messengers, couriers, certainly associated with some of the seasonal activity but also not particularly great jobs necessarily. although on the other side you ve got the manufacturing. the bad, you know, some of these levels are still very hot. 8.5% unemployment. it s a gain off the past few months. but it s still too high. the ugly? well that s congress. the question again, are we going to back to this kind of self-inflicted
working part-time or working kind of a contract job or something and it s not captured overall in the numbers, is that how we can explain only 36,000 jobs but a 9% unemployment rate? that s part of the explanation. there s no question that one of the things that the bls data is very bad at, the official government data, is capturing shifts in small business employment and particularly new firm employment. we saw a doubling of ipos in the fourth quarter and that s just a harbinger of new hiring going forward by firms. the other issue is weather. 886,000 workers did not show up for work the week the survey was taken. the bulk of the losses in this report came in construction and in transportation jobs. atlanta airport, the busiest in the world, was shut down. right. all those service personnel that service those jobs did not show up across the east coast and that had a major toll on employment. so as much as i agree that we re getting job growth but not enough, the job gains have a