The US labor market added 178,000 jobs in March, rebounding from a worse-than-initially-reported loss of 133,000 jobs in February. This continues a volatile pattern where job growth has alternated between negative and positive every month since May of last year. The March gains occurred during the early weeks of the Iran war.
For years, the labor market reliably added jobs every single month, even as hiring cooled. The economy has now entered a more volatile state, with dramatic swings in employment that have netted out to roughly zero growth over the past 12 months according to NerdWallet senior economist Elizabeth Renter.