The economy is looking brighter

According to March data provided by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the economy is on the upswing and the challenges of the recent stay at home orders and mass closings of business as usual are not going to have a devastating impact on the long term health of the financial systems as many had feared.

Total nonfarm payroll employment jumped 916,000 while the nationwide unemployment rate fell to 6%, numbers show. The largest gains took place in leisure and hospitality, public and private education and construction.

Have vaccine, will travel

Especially in smaller airports, volume is back to pre-pandemic levels. LIkely a byproduct of the surge in popularity of National Parks as vacation destinations. With Europe largely off the table, Americans are getting outside and going to more local destinations served by these smaller airlines. According to the NY Times: “In the West, big-city airports — in San Francisco, Portland, Seattle — are serving a fraction of their typical traveler volume, between 24 percent and 46 percent. But smaller regional airports, near Jackson Hole, Wyo., and Colorado ski country, have passenger volume as much as 12 percent higher than this time last year.”

Back to work!

In March, nearly two-thirds of the 280,000 jobs that were added in the leisure and hospitality sectors were related to food services and drinking places, the bureau reports. Employment in local government education, state government education, and private education also rose by 76,000, 50,000, and 64,000 respectively. Construction jobs increased by 110,000. Unemployment hovers at 9.7 million and the number of people on temporary layoff dropped by 203,000 to 2 million last month from the high in April 2020 of 18 million.