U.S. economy: jobs, jobs, jobs

Jobs.

It's the key figure for any economy because if people don't have jobs they tend to buy less stuff.

And if nobody's buying anything, companies aren't making money. And if companies aren't making money, they're not hiring. And this confidence game (or lack of confidence game, depending on the economic cycle) marches on and on.

So on the last Friday of every month in the U.S., the same ritual takes place: traders, economists, business executives and various normal humans crowd around their Bloomberg machines or CNBC, and wait, eagerly, for the monthly jobs check up.

That happened again today, and the latest figures on the world's largest economy are not too bad.

The U.S. Labor Department reports that the economy added 216,000 jobs in March. That's better than expected and it's the second straight month that the figure was above 200,000. In fact, that back-to-back 200K growth in jobs hasn't happened since 2006, two full years before the global economic crisis crashed into the U.S. labor market.

Meanwhile, the U.S. unemployment rate in March slid to 8.8 percent. That's a two-year low, and down a full percentage point since December.

“The U.S. labor market is finally making some serious progress,” Sal Guatieri, economist at BMO Capital Markets Economics told the Associated Press.

But it's not all great news.

Take a look at this chart from the excellent Calculated Risk blog, which shows that the current job picture significantly lags other economic recoveries in U.S. history.

Here's how Calculated Risk put it:

The current employment recession is by far the worst recession since WWII in percentage terms, and 2nd worst in terms of the unemployment rate (only the early '80s recession with a peak of 10.8 percent was worse).