Good morning.
Friday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 35. Sunrise is 7:25 and sunset 4:35 for 9h 10m 13s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 35.8% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Community Development Authority will hold a Visioning & Planning Workshop at 11:30 AM.
On this day in 1781, Richmond, Virginia, is burned by British naval forces led by former American general, and traitor to our people, Benedict Arnold.
Talmon Joseph Smith reports U.S. Job Growth Remains Strong (‘The labor market showed continued resiliency in December, with employers adding 216,000 jobs last month, a sign that economic growth remains vigorous’):
The labor market ended the year with a bang.
Employers added 216,000 jobs in December on a seasonally adjusted basis, the Labor Department reported on Friday, surpassing the expectations of economists.It was the 36th consecutive month of gains.
Altogether, the U.S. economy added roughly 2.7 million jobs over the past year. That’s a smaller gain than in 2021 or 2022, during the economy’s initial resurgence from the pandemic lockdowns. Yet the gains of 2023 are still stronger than those in the late 2010s.
The numbers are buoying expectations of what has been called a soft landing — in which the economy is able to avoid significant job loss while shifting into a calmer, more sustainable gear, after the years of disorienting volatility that began with the arrival of Covid-19 roughly four years ago.
Many experts caution that data for December is notoriously hard to calculate in any year because of the hiring churn caused by the holiday season.
The unemployment rate, based on a survey of households, was unchanged at 3.7 percent.
Average hourly earnings for workers — a common measure of wage gains — rose 0.4 percent from the previous month and were up 4.1 percent from December 2022.
Layoffs remain near record lows, beneath prepandemic levels.
A mixture of economic data in the past couple of months that appears neither too hot nor too cold has given a lift to both investors and policymakers at the Federal Reserve, who have been pleasantly surprised at the continuing balance between falling inflation and sustainable growth.
Freakishly Smart Falcons Run These [Falkland] Islands (‘The success of wild striated caracaras in a test suggests that the intellects of more bird species may be underestimated’):