Despite Hurricane Sandy Nov employment growth continues.

7.7% unemployment

+146,000 non-farm jobs

There really are two stories here; excuse me for conflating the BLS and ADP reports to build the proper narrative.

The first story is that Hurricane Sandy, despite delivering tens of billions of dollars in damages and lost productivity, could not stall job growth.  As Mark Zandi noted in yesterday's ADP National Employment Report, Sandy cut 86,000 jobs from private payrolls.  And yet, ADP's private payroll report showed a growth of 118,000 jobs.  That's just remarkable, because it means that underlying employment is surging.

Not to get sidetracked, but the quiet story on the devastation of Hurricane Sandy points to an economic threat from anthropomorphic global warming with the combination of rising oceans and greater and more frequent extreme meteorological events.  

The second story is that, four years later, we can now see that Obama did good.

Chart from Nov ADP National Employment Report

When you look at this overlay of ADP and BLS jobs data, you can see that there was a strong "V"; now while this applied to monthly jobs data, obviously it did not exactly correspond to the unemployment rate.  If you shade the regions between the slope and the zero-line, the recession was an uncontrolled free-fall with millions of jobs lost, and there's still a lot of job creation to be done before the economy has fully recovered.

Here's an interesting tidbit: If you count the number of months from the bottom of the recession to the first month where job growth exceeded 150,000 jobs (the number many people point to, as the necessary amount to keep up with population growth, even though it is a false reference number), Obama's recovery has been faster than Bush's.  For the 2001 recession, it was 24 months.  For the 2008-2009 recession, it was 14 months.  That's amazing when you account for the depth of the 2008-2009 recession.

So look at the chart again, and ask yourself: When did job growth start to falter?  I'm betting most reasonable people can see quite clearly that job growth was showing signs of slowing down long before 2008.  You can see that during 2006 job growth started to slow down, just before it began to collapse altogether in late 2007 and 2008.

More on the relevance of detecting the early signs of a faltering economy and the state of our debt, in some future post.