Unemployment is down in the United States, but the “boomflation” worries

At this rate, the United States will return to its pre-pandemic level of activity.

REUTERS/Andrew Kelly/File Photo

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1 min

US unemployment figures for the month of February were released on Friday and they are positive.

Joe Biden welcomes this, but it is not certain that he will gain from it in a very uncertain context.

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With our correspondent in Washington,

Guillaume Naudin

An unemployment rate that drops to 3.8%.

Nearly 680,000 net job creations in almost all sectors in this first month of recovery after the Omicron wave.

For a total of more than seven million since Joe Biden has been in charge of the country.

Only two million jobs are missing to return to the pre-pandemic level of activity.

If the current pace is maintained, it will be done in three months, unless the international situation weighs on economic activity and growth.

However, the American president does not need to be asked to highlight these good results in a press release.

He attributes them to his policy and his desire to rebuild the economy from top to bottom.

The icing on the cake, these job creations are accompanied by a salary increase of more than 5% over one year.

But this last figure comes up against the one that worries Americans the most: that of inflation, at its highest for forty years.

Joe Biden knows it and says it, the whole country is staring at gas pump meters.

At the very moment when these good figures were published, we learned that a gallon of gasoline, a little less than four liters, had taken on average 11 cents overnight.

A word has even been invented to characterize the period of strong growth and rising prices: “boomflation”.

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  • United States

  • Employment and Labor

  • Joe Biden