Last Friday’s US labour market statistics sent the exact opposite signal from that of the previous month. Recall that in February, faster-than-expected wage growth was followed by a sharp sell-off in financial markets, attributed to stronger expectations of Federal Reserve tightening. This time round, however, it was jobs growth that outpaced expectations, with wages growing at an entirely quiescent rate — nothing to make the Fed’s trigger finger itch.

Monthly figures bob up and down, and both the previous and the current ones were, or should have been, unremarkable ripples around an unchanged trend. The important matter is what the trend shows, and what it implies for economic policy. The simplest story here is the best: there is just no sign that the US economy is close to exhausting its productive capacity and beginning to overheat. On the contrary, the regularity with which continued growth keeps pulling previously inactive workers into the labour force, without any undue pressure for wages to accelerate, is the surest sign that 10 years after the global financial crisis, policymakers still have not managed to bring the economy back to full employment.

The chart below illustrates the point. It charts the ratio of employment and unemployment within the prime working-age population, ie those aged between 25 and 54, to minimise the influence of demographic change. (The unemployment rate measured in this way appears graphically as the gap between the employment rate and the total.)