American Express has a full-page ad in today’s Times offering a savings account yielding 1.15 percent.

These days that is a good rate, a fact the people of my generation find astonishing. Such amazingly low rates cause great anxiety for those who saved money in the past and now find it yields so little.

I did a little arithmetic. My son is an 18-year-old college freshman. If he puts $100 into such an account now, and rates remain constant, he will have doubled his money in time for his 79th birthday party.

Of course, if you are investing for a child in kindergarten, there is still hope. A $100 investment today would double about the time he or she goes on Medicare.

The Off the Charts column this week takes a look at inflation and tries to adjust the reports by including home prices. Existing indexes estimate the housing costs for homeowners by measuring the rental value of their homes, not their prices.

I want to emphasize that the indexes I built are far from exact replicas of the measure that existed before house prices were kicked out of the Consumer Price Index at the end of 1982. I know of no available index of changes in property taxes, which used to be an important part of the housing component of the C.P.I., and I did not try to include mortgage interest costs, as the old index did.

Nor am I trying to argue that a revised index is clearly needed. I am old enough to remember the arguments when the change was made in 1982, and there were good reasons for it. There is no perfect measure for inflation — or many other things — available, which is one reason that writing about the economy is fun and challenging.

It is clear that the way housing costs are measured makes a big difference in inflation rates. At the moment, owners’ implicit rent accounts for 23 percent of the C.P.I., more than energy and food combined. And it accounts for 30 percent of the core index, which excludes food and energy. I thought it was worth understanding that we may be at a point when the inflation picture looks very different if housing prices are included. That is something policy makers should take into account.

Whenever I write about inflation these days, I get e-mails from readers convinced that there is a conspiracy to cover up rampant price increases. Passions are inflamed because some payments, such as Social Security benefits, are linked to inflation rates. Understating inflation rates would cost recipients money.
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The jobs numbers keep getting better. They are not that good yet, but there are signs they will keep improving.

Over the last 12 months, the number of jobs in the United States rose 1 percent. That last time that happened was in the 12 months through July 2007. Private sector jobs are doing even better, but state and local government employment remain sore spots and there is no sign of revival for the construction industry.

There are signs that younger people are getting more jobs, which is good news.

The unemployment rate keeps declining — down a full percentage point in four months. That is very rapid, and in my more optimistic moments I doubt the widespread consensus that it will be years before that rate gets down to acceptable levels.

From January through March, here are some changes, according to the household survey:

Labor force, up 220,000
Employment, up 541,000
Unemployment, down 321,000

The household survey can be volatile, so it is risky to leap to conclusions, but those numbers make it look as if the decline in the unemployment rate is coming from the right direction — more jobs — rather than the wrong one, people dropping out of the labor force. (Normally, I’d look at a longer time frame, but the government changed its population estimates at the end of last year, making it hard to compare figures from late 2010.)

The Business Roundtable, an organization of major chief executives, says that 52 percent of its members expect to add workers over the next six months, while only 11 percent expect to reduce employment. The Roundtable has an employment index based on that quarterly survey, which goes back to 2002. It has never been higher.

Some economic statistics have been weaker than expected lately, leading to speculation the recovery was faltering. The job numbers provide at least mild evidence that is not so. But this news does not indicate that the economy is in any shape to withstand a significant tightening of either fiscal or monetary policy.

Alan Greenspan is back, lecturing the regulators that they can’t possibly hope to do the jobs the Dodd-Frank law assigned to them.

In an op-ed piece in Wednesday’s Financial Times, Mr. Greenspan writes:

In pressing forward, the regulators are being entrusted with forecasting, and presumably preventing, all undesirable repercussions that might happen to a market when its regulatory conditions are importantly altered. No one has such skills. Regulators were caught “flat-footed” by a breakdown we had erroneously thought was more than adequately reserved against.

In other words, the fact that he completely failed to do his job — and in the process brought on a financial crisis whose effects are still felt — is ample evidence that it is futile to try to do the job at all.

He goes on:

The problem is that regulators, and for that matter everyone else, can never get more than a glimpse at the internal workings of the simplest of modern financial systems. Today’s competitive markets, whether we seek to recognise it or not, are driven by an international version of Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” that is unredeemably opaque. With notably rare exceptions (2008, for example), the global “invisible hand” has created relatively stable exchange rates, interest rates, prices and wage rates.

I really like that part about “notably rare exceptions.” It reminds me of a defense lawyer arguing that while his client may have committed a few murders on one particular day, his conduct on all the other days of his life had been exemplary.

4:22 p.m. | Updated to correct current limit on conforming home loans.

The new-home sales numbers for February came out today, and they are horrible.

The government estimates that 19,000 new single-family homes were sold during the month. That is the lowest figure for any month since the figures began to be compiled in 1963. At a seasonally adjusted annual rate, that works out to an annual pace of 250,000. That, too, is the lowest ever.

February can, of course, be explained away by bad weather. But this is also the lowest 12 months ever, with sales of 349,000 new homes.

Sales of existing homes are not robust, but they have stabilized. Mortgages are more available now than they were a year ago, particularly for so-called “conforming mortgages.” But there is an oversupply of housing in many areas, and the home construction business seems unlikely to recover for a long time.

Based on seasonally adjusted annual rates, here are the 20 slowest months since 1963. I’ve italicized the ones that came before the housing market peaked in 2006. There are only four.

1- Feb-2011 250,000
2- Aug-2010 274,000
3- Oct-2010 280,000
4- May-2010 282,000
5- Jul-2010 283,000
6- Nov-2010 286,000
7- Jan-2011 301,000
8- Jun-2010 310,000
9- Sep-2010 317,000
10- Dec-2010 333,000
11- Sep-1981 338,000
12- Jan-2009 339,000
13- Apr-1982 339,000
14- Apr-2009 341,000
15- Feb-2010 347,000
16- Jan-2010 349,000
17- Mar-2009 350,000
18- Dec-2009 356,000
19- Oct-1981 356,000
20- Sep-1966 358,000

Last spring there was a small revival in sales of new homes. We knew then that it was brought on by a temporary tax credit for buyers, and when sales fell off in the summer we could explain that as an equally temporary phenomenon, the result of sales being brought forward by the credit.

Now those temporary effects should have gone away. Instead, sales get worse and worse. Next fall, on Oct. 1, the conforming loan limits for Fannie and Freddie will decline. Now they will guarantee mortgages up to $729,750 in some high-cost areas. Unless Congress acts — and the Obama administration says it should not — the limit will fall to a maximum of $625,500.

A vast majority of new homes being sold now are below those levels, anyway, so perhaps that won’t matter that much. But it won’t help.

I’ll have more to say on this in the Off the Charts column. But the bottom line is that we are experiencing something not seen before — a complete disconnect between sales rates of new and existing homes.

Over the last several years, it has been amazing that people did not seem to have learned that e-mails could — and would — be searched if something ever got to court. E-mails that incriminated the writers, or at least embarrassed them, became a fixture of lawsuits and trials. A whole industry was born to efficiently search though millions of messages.

Now it appears that some people not only learned that lesson, but also applied it.

Raj Rajaratnam is heard on wiretaps at his insider trading trial talking about setting up an e-mail trail to provide evidence that he had a different reason for buying a stock on which he had received inside information from Anil Kumar, a former McKinsey consultant who has pleaded guilty and is testifying for the government.

The Wall Street Journal reports:

“You just have to be careful, right?” Mr. Rajaratnam told the former Galleon employees, adding that he would send an e-mail asking about a stock “so that we just protect ourselves.”

“We just have a[n] e-mail trail, right, that uh … I brought it up,” he said, after telling them about the deal described to him by Mr. Kumar.

“That’s good,” an employee on the call said.

Of course, it did not occur to anyone that the feds would be recording telephone calls.

Hedge funds are largely unregulated, and that may have added to the sense of confidence. Brokers often record employee conversations, in part to prevent misunderstandings on trades, and their employees understand that such recordings can be produced. It appears that Mr. Rajaratnam and his colleagues never dreamed something similar could happen.

As it is, the fact he learned the e-mail lesson may make it even worse for Mr. Rajaratnam. Evidence of a cover-up has been the critical point in many cases where there might have been a credible case that a person did not intentionally do anything illegal in the first place.

That is a lesson that Richard Nixon once learned.

Two categories stand out in the jobs numbers, a one good and a one bad.

State and local government employment continues to fall. From the peak in August 2008, 450,000 such jobs have vanished, or 2.3 percent of the total. Traditionally such jobs are among the safest, and that is a record decline in numbers, but not percent. At the worst in 1982, the loss was 417,000 jobs, or 3.1 percent.

Manufacturing jobs continue to rise. Over the last year, 189,000 such jobs were added. Given the level of new orders that companies are reporting, that could be a source of strength for some time.

A month ago, the two jobs reports together made no sense at all. We were told the unemployment rate fell but few people got jobs. That was possible because the figures come from two different surveys, one of employers and one of households. To make it even more confusing, the government changed its estimates of the population, to make it hard to compare the household numbers from one month to the next.

The predictable result was that most everyone found support for their earlier opinions.

This month’s numbers are much more consistent. We are told that the economy added 192,000 jobs. With previous figures also revised up, the total number of jobs in February is 250,000 more than what we had been told was the figure for January. The unemployment rate fell to 8.9 percent.

I’ll be back later with more analysis. But for now note that the last time the unemployment rate fell 0.9 percentage points in three months was in 1983. That was when the economy finally started to rise rapidly after the double-dip recessions of the early 1980s.

An important point to remember is that almost every economic statistic has been looking up, with the notable exception of the jobs figure. Now it seems to be falling in line.

The Federal Reserve periodically polls the members of its Open Market Committee — board members and presidents of the regional Fed banks — on their economic outlook. Their expectations are worth looking at because those are the forecasts that affect monetary policy decisions, and are therefore more important than other forecasts whether or not they are better forecasters.

But how good are they?

The Fed last week released its latest forecasts, based on a poll at the late-January meeting of the F.O.M.C.

The range of gross domestic product forecasts for 2011 was from 3.2 percent to 4.2 percent, but the Fed also releases a “central tendency” figure, excluding the three highest and three lowest forecasts. That range is 3.4 percent to 3.9 percent.

The central tendencies for the other indicators in 2011 are:

Unemployment rate (fourth quarter average) 8.8 to 9 percent
Inflation (PCE deflator) 1.3 to 1.7 percent
Core inflation (PCE deflator excluding food and energy) 1.0 to 1.3 percent

The Fed officials’ last forecast, in November, had 2011 G.D.P. growth at 3 to 3.6 percent, so they are more optimistic.

I looked at their last four January forecasts for the year that was beginning. They were generally reasonably close, except when it really mattered. Their 2008 forecasts were wildly optimistic.

A year ago, these were the 2010 forecasts, with the actual number, according to preliminary figures that could yet be changed, in bold.

2010 G.D.P.: up 2.8 to 3.5 percent (2.8 percent)
Unemployment rate: 9.5 to 9.7 percent (9.6 percent)
PCE deflator: 1.4 to 1.7 percent (1.2 percent)
Core PCE deflator: 1.1 to 1.7 percent (0.8 percent)

Overall, that is a pretty good showing, with a couple of caveats. The unemployment rate plunged at the end of 2010, to 9.4 percent in December, and fell to 9 percent in January. But using the fourth quarter average left them within the range. And inflation was less than forecast, although you would never know that from some of the heated rhetoric now being heard.

For this year, they would seem to be forecasting no improvement in the unemployment rate, but their forecast came before they knew about the 9 percent rate for January. In any case, the job and unemployment data is now more confusing than ever.

Two years ago, their forecasts were too pessimistic about growth, but too optimistic about unemployment. They also got inflation too low:

2009 G.D.P.: -1.3 to -0.5 percent (up 0.2 percent)
Unemployment rate: 8.5 to 8.8 percent (10.0 percent)
PCE deflator: 0.3 to 1.0 percent (1.5 percent)
Core PCE deflator: 0.9 to 1.1 percent (1.7 percent)

Three years ago, the forecasts were not nearly pessimistic enough:

2008 G.D.P.: up 1.3 to 2.0 percent (down 2.8 percent)
Unemployment rate: 5.2 to 5.3 percent (6.9 percent)
PCE deflator: 2.1 to 2.4 percent (1.7 percent)
Core PCE deflator: 2.0 to 2.2 percent (2.0 percent)

Four years ago, the forecasts were not too bad, although growth was at the bottom of the predicted range:

2007 G.D.P.: 2.25 percent to 3.25 percent (2.3 percent)
Unemployment rate: 4.5 to 4.75 percent (4.8 percent)
Core PCE deflator: 2.0 to 2.25 percent (2.4 percent)

While the 2008 forecast was quite wrong, at least the Fed knew there were major risks. This paragraph, headed “Risks to the Outlook,” sounds prescient:

Most participants viewed the risks to their G.D.P. projections as weighted to the downside and the associated risks to their projections of unemployment as tilted to the upside. The possibility that house prices could decline more steeply than anticipated, further reducing households’ wealth and access to credit, was perceived as a significant risk to the central outlook for economic growth and employment. In addition, despite some recovery in money markets after the turn of the year, financial market conditions continued to be strained — stock prices had declined sharply since the December meeting, concerns about further potential losses at major financial institutions had mounted amid worries about the condition of financial guarantors, and credit conditions had tightened in general for both households and firms. The potential for adverse interactions, in which weaker economic activity could lead to a worsening of financial conditions and a reduced availability of credit, which in turn could further damp economic growth, was viewed as an especially worrisome possibility.

To New Yorkers, there are few apartments more legendary than the Dakota, at the corner of 72nd Street and Central Park West. Most of us know that we could never hope to live there, assuming we did not win the state lottery a few times. But I had no idea just how expensive it was.

Now we know more. It turns out that at least one part-time occupant of the building spends multiples of his reported annual income on living expenses.

A former president of the Dakota’s co-op board, Alphonse Fletcher Jr., has sued the board after it refused to allow him to buy another apartment to combine with one of the two he now owns. (The second is lived in by his mother, who is now a board member.) He claims his proposed $5.7 million purchase was rejected by the board because of racial discrimination. The board denies it and says it was just worried about his finances.

This part of the article caught my eye:

Mr. Fletcher’s annual mortgage payments . . . are about $1.5 million, yet his tax returns show his annual income is far less. . . . In 2008, Mr. Fletcher reported an adjusted gross income of $674,000. . . . [H]is total annual maintenance cost would rise to $228,873 and renovations would cost $1 million to $2 million.

How, I wondered, could anyone swing that? Mortgage payments are more than double his income, even before considering his other expenses, including maintenance. If he completed the deal, he would own two apartments — one being the combination of the new one and his old one — as well as some scattered rooms in the building that are supposed to be used in connection with the apartments, such as for servant’s quarters. The monthly maintenance would be $19,073.

I read the redacted version of the board’s filing with the court, and it got more interesting. It turns out that Mr. Fletcher, who runs a money management firm, Fletcher Asset Management (FAM), actually lives in San Francisco. “He has been present at the Dakota only infrequently over the last few years,” states an affidavit from Bruce Barnes, the board’s president and a former hedge fund executive.

The board presents evidence that those mortgage payments are “are almost entirely interest” and include no repayment of principal, and that Mr. Fletcher’s total debt of $20.8 million, which he calls business debt, is actually from Chase Home Finance, a division of JPMorgan.

Who says the banks won’t lend to homeowners?

But I digress. The question was how Mr. Fletcher managed to meet his obligations. Mr. Barnes explains:

“The Finance Committee discussed that Fletcher has been funding his debt service obligations, Dakota maintenance fees and other expenses by making withdrawals from FAM. These capital withdrawal diminish his investment firm’s future profit capacity.”

It adds that “Fletcher’s withdrawals from FAM to fund personal expenditures were “$1,800,000 in 2007, $6,400,000 in 2008 and $5,300,000 in 2009.”

We are told that Mr. Fletcher’s business reported a profit of $720,715 in 2007, but that combined losses in 2008 and 2009 exceeded that amount. His personal tax returns indicate total income over the three years of about $1.5 million.

I would not dream of telling the Dakota board who should or should not be allowed to buy an apartment. New York law, as I understand it, states a co-op board may reject any applicant for any reason — unless the reason is a prohibited one, like racial discrimination.

I assume Mr. Fletcher and his business are in complete compliance with federal and state tax laws. But it sounds like there may be a loophole in there somewhere.

This is an argument for a consumption tax, or for reform of the income tax. Mr. Fletcher appears to live a whole lot better — or at least more expensively — than his reported income would indicate was possible.

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The Times reports today:

A month after the authorities began taxing Romania’s witches and fortunetellers on their trade, Parliament is considering a new bill that would subject them to fines or even prison if their predictions do not come true.

This could set a dangerous precedent. What if they adopted a similar law for economists?

Or, worse yet, newspaper columnists?

If the Fed is buying, perhaps you should sell.

On Nov. 3, as you may recall, the Fed announced what became known as QE2, the planned purchase of $600 billion in Treasury bonds.

The Fed was focusing on the midrange of the yield curve, with two-thirds of the money buying Treasuries with maturities of 4 to 10 years.

The market reacted by selling long Treasuries and buying the ones the Fed wanted. “We have to follow the Fed and buy 5- to 10-year Treasuries,” a money manager explained to a Bloomberg reporter the next day.

It turned out to be a bad strategy.

Here is what has happened to the yields of the Treasuries the Fed wanted, from Nov. 4, after the buying on the news, through today.

5-year note: Then 1.03%. Now 2.36%
7-year note: Then 1.73%. Now 3.08%
10-year bond: Then 2.49%. Now 3.69%

If you bought the then-current Treasury of that maturity then, and sold today, here are the capital losses:

5-year note: 5.5%
7-year note: 7.9%
10-year bond: 9.3%

These are extraordinary figures for a period of almost 14 weeks. The flight to safety produced nothing but losses.

To be sure, the Fed had telegraphed back in August that it planned something like QE2, creating an artificial rally. But the gains from that rally were wiped out weeks ago, and the losses are mounting even for those who got in then.

All this is good news — at least for those who don’t own the bonds. The market is starting to price in some economic growth, and that is a signal the Fed’s efforts may have worked. (Or maybe it was the much-maligned stimulus plan.)

Some will argue that rising Treasury rates shows rising fears of inflation. Break-even inflation rates — the inflation rates at which inflation-linked securities would be a better investment than comparable regular Treasuries, have gone up.

But not by much. Back in November the market seemed to be pricing in annual inflation for the next five years of about 1.5 percent. Now the forecast is up to almost 2 percent, hardly a sign of panic. Owners of inflation-linked bonds have suffered significant losses as rates rose, something that would not have happened if rates were rising because of inflationary concerns.

A reader thinks I owe you a correction for saying, in my column today:

Nearly everyone with a job got a raise in January, courtesy of Uncle Sam, who reduced payroll taxes.

The reader writes:

In fact, about 51 million Americans’ taxes went up — mostly low-wage employees’ — according to the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, Table T10-0277.

. . .

My disgruntled employees thank you in advance for the correction.

The reader has a point. The article is correct in that nearly everyone got a payroll tax reduction, but it should have mentioned that the failure to renew a provision that benefited low-wage workers will hurt many workers.

Here’s what Roberton Williams of the Tax-Policy Center wrote in December:

Why would the working poor pay more? Because the proposal would replace this year’s Making Work Pay (M.W.P.) credit with a temporary reduction in the Social Security payroll tax from 6.2 percent to 4.2 percent. That’s a good deal for high earners, who got nothing from M.W.P. (thanks to an income phaseout), but a bad deal for those making $20,000 or less.

He calculates that “single taxpayers who earn less than $20,000 and married couples earning less than $40,000 will pay more in taxes under the payroll tax cut than under M.W.P.”

The provision turns out to affect some people who don’t even have jobs. Mr. Williams reports in his blog today:

Many retirees were surprised when their January pension checks were smaller than their December payments. Pension plans had increased withholding for federal income tax, shrinking net benefits. But pensioners shouldn’t worry—they’ll get it all back next year when they file their federal tax returns. It’s only a matter of timing.

Here’s how it works. Because of the expiration of Making Work Pay, the I.R.S. raised withholding rates. So some retirees will have higher withholding, and the lowering of the payroll tax won’t help because they don’t pay it on pensions anyway. The actual taxes did not go up, so it just means a bigger refund next year, all other things being equal. But it does tend to offset the stimulative effect of the payroll tax reduction.

The Madoff trustee’s lawsuit against JPMorgan Chase (a k a, at least in this suit, JPMC) reads like no other lawsuit I have read. It begins this way:

NATURE OF THE ACTION
“‘But the Emperor has nothing on at all!!!’ said a little child.”
Hans Christian Andersen, The Emperor’s New Clothes

“For whatever it[']s worth, I am sitting at lunch with REDACTED [JPMC Employee 1] who just told me that there is a well-known cloud over the head of Madoff and that his returns are speculated to be part of a [P]onzi scheme.”
REDACTED[JPMC Employee 2], REDACTED risk officer, Investment Bank, JPMC, June 15, 2007

1. The story has been told time and again how Madoff duped the best and the brightest in the investment community. The Trustee’s investigation reveals a very different story — the story of financial institutions worldwide that were keen to the likely fraud, and decidedly turned a blind eye to it. While numerous financial institutions enabled Madoff’s fraud, JPMC was at the very center of that fraud, and thoroughly complicit it in.

Thoroughly complicit? That is strong language. It is one thing to say they should have known, or that they were suspicious but did not do the work they should have done to confirm those suspicions. The suit says both of those things, and seems to have evidence to back them up. It also has evidence that anyone in the bank who looked at Bernard L. Madoff’s bank account transactions could have noticed money was not coming in from sales of securities, and money was not going out for purchases.

But complicit means a willing partner. JPMorgan Chase says that is nonsense, as Diana Henriques reports.

Does the trustee have evidence of that? The best you can say is maybe.

Here’s what is clear. JPMorgan Chase sold structured products that enabled customers to get triple the yield Madoff was generating, less some fees of course. It then invested in hedge funds that had Madoff managing their money, known as Madoff feeder funds. For the bank, it was a riskless investment strategy, or so it seemed.

But in 2008 the bank grew more and more alarmed. In September — the month Lehman Brothers failed, you may recall — the bank got what it viewed as threats against it if it liquidated its investment, and reported that to British authorities. In that report Chase said it was skeptical about the legitimacy of the Madoff operation. The threats did not come from Mr. Madoff, but from a customer who had bought the products from Chase and resold them to its own customers.

Here is where it gets really interesting. JPMorgan Chase did move to cash in all of its investments, although the fraud blew up in December 2008, before it received the last $35 million. Another excerpt from the suit, with BLMIS referring to Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities:

In redeeming its investments . . . JPMC left itself fully exposed with regard to its structured products. JPMC was still required to pay its investors based on the returns generated by the BLMIS feeder funds, which were generating positive returns when the market was down. But for JPMC’s suspicions about fraud at BLMIS, this move would have been counterintuitive.

Two things stand out. First, JPMorgan Chase no longer had a riskless strategy. If it turned out Madoff’s returns were genuine, it stood to lose a lot of money since it would have to pay the investors in the structured products. Second, the suit refers to the bank’s “suspicions.” That is a very different word from “complicit.”

The evidence in the lawsuit clearly shows that people at JPMorgan Chase saw red flags, and that others saw an opportunity for the bank to make money if it ignored the red flags. An internal memo written later — after the fraud was disclosed — states that the risk of fraud “was considered at the time to be a remote likelihood.”

After Lehman went broke on Sept. 15, there was a flight to riskless investments everywhere. Had JPMorgan Chase taken out its own money, it would be easy to believe that, despite its suspicions, it did not really know anything. But its haste, given the exposure it faced if Madoff was not a fraud, certainly raises questions.

JPMorgan Chase says it will “defend itself vigorously against the unfounded claims brought by the trustee.” I look forward to the trial.

Addendum: This was corrected to fix the spelling of Hans Christian Andersen. The error was by the writer; the name was spelled correctly in the suit.

It sometimes seems like every era has a crucial economic statistic, the one that everyone thinks will be very important when it comes out.

When I first started covering business in the late 1970s, it was money supply. That number came out weekly, and if I recall correctly, the Fed changed the release day from Friday afternoon to Thursday afternoon, presumably to avoid making everyone stay around Friday afternoon. We thought that number (or those numbers, since there was M1 and M2 and M3, each of which had a period of being deemed very important) would be critical to what the Fed did on monetary policy. Offices had pools on the number.

At other times the trade deficit was deemed critical, although I don’t remember ever betting on it.

Now it is jobs that is the No. 1 statistic. If and when the monthly payroll number improves, there will be celebrations in some quarters, and fear in others. The fear stems from the fact the Federal Reserve thinks the number is critical. It might move away buying Treasuries by the bucket if the number begins to look better.

Ben S. Bernanke said as much Thursday. He gave a generally upbeat report on the economy at the National Press Club, and then added:

Until we see a sustained period of stronger job creation, we cannot consider the recovery to be truly established.

We get the January number on Friday, and I discuss what is happening in my Friday column, which you can read here.

David Leonhardt and I exchanged thoughts on jobs today, and you can read them on the Economix blog. On Friday morning, after the report comes out, we plan to have further conversations, which will also be on that blog.

And in Saturday’s Times, my Off the Charts column will look at the history of the monthly number, which is often far from the number that emerges after all the revisions, and delve into why it is so often wrong.