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“It reinforces the case for the economy being stronger than it’s looked for the last couple of months,” said Bill Cheney, chief economist at John Hancock Financial Services in Boston. “It makes life easier for the Fed and feeds into continuing the tapering process.”
The report also showed the largest increase in average hourly earnings in eight months and the payrolls count for December and January was revised up to show 25,000 more jobs created during those months than previously reported.
Investors on Wall Street cheered the report and the Standard & Poor’s 500 index .SPX reached a fresh intraday record high before falling back to trade marginally lower.
The dollar lifted off a four-month low against a basket of currencies, while the yield on the benchmark 10-year U.S. Treasury note jumped to a six-week high, putting it on course for its biggest weekly rise in three months.
Interest rate futures showed that traders ramped up bets on the Fed raising rates a bit sooner than had been previously thought. They now point to a 53% probability of a rate hike in June 2015.
Unusually cold and snowy weather has disrupted activity in much of the United States for months, and a few economists had begun to speculate that the U.S. central bank could reconsider its plan to wind down its bond-buying stimulus.
The eastern and central United States experienced record low temperatures last month, and ice and snow blanketed densely populated areas during the week employers were surveyed for February payrolls. The winter storms left Wall Street bracing for a much weaker report. Economists had forecast nonfarm payrolls rising by only 149,000 jobs.
The weather, however, did have an impact. It cut into the length of the average workweek, which hit its lowest level since January 2011 and led to a drop in a measure of total work effort. But economists expect a reversal as soon as this month.
“The economy will defrost in the spring and heat up in the summer,” said Michelle Meyer, a senior economist at Bank of America Merrill Lynch in New York. “We should see solid gains in job growth in coming months.”
The smaller survey of households from which the unemployment rate is derived showed 6.9 million people with jobs reported they were working part-time because of the weather. That was the highest reading for February since the series started in 1978.
It also showed 601,000 people could not get to work because of the weather, the highest level for February since 2010. Economists said job growth in February would have been as high as 200,000 if not for the weather.
Payrolls averaged about 205,000 new jobs per month in the first 11 months of 2013, but that figure dropped to just 129,000 for December, January and February.
Growth slowdown temporary
Fed officials, from Chair Janet Yellen on down, view the recent economic weakness as largely weather-related and temporary, and have suggested it does not meet the high bar they have set in terms of what it would take for them to stop scaling back their bond-buying stimulus.
The Fed has already reduced its monthly bond purchases by $10 billion at each of its last two meetings, and a similar reduction is expected when officials next meet on March 18-19.
But the weather is not the only factor behind the lull in activity. Businesses are working through a huge pile of unsold goods accumulated in the second half of 2013, which means they have no incentive to place new orders with manufacturers.
In addition, the expiration of long-term unemployment benefits for more than one million Americans in December and cuts to food stamps are also hurting spending.
As a result of these temporary factors, growth in the first quarter is expected to slow to an annual rate below 2%. The economy grew at a 2.4% rate in the final quarter of 2013.
Economists welcomed the rise in the unemployment rate as a sign of labor market strength, since it was driven by Americans taking up the hunt for work.
