We actually lost jobs in February. From Marketplace, I'm Nancy Marshall Genser in for David Bancaccio.

We just learned this morning that hiring in the U.S. economy reversed course in the month of February.

After job gains in January, the number of people on payrolls fell by 92,000 last month.

For more on this, let's welcome Diane Swank,

chief economist at KPMG. Hi, Diane. Good morning. So forecasters were expecting February hiring to be down from January, but this big loss of jobs was a surprise, wasn't it?

It was a surprise, and it really underscores how dependent the U.S.

economy has become in the labor market on health care and social assistance. There was a major

strike in California and Hawaii that shaved 27,000 jobs off the total of health care and social

assistance, which added jobs last month. And this is the first

decline in that sector since early 2022. That's really important because when you are so dependent

on only one leg of a stool to hold the labor market up, you lose that leg when they have something like a strike.

And I suppose it didn't help that much of the country had very bad weather snowstorms in February.

Did that play into these numbers?

That actually, those really bad snowstorms hit later in the month after the survey was taken. And so there wasn't as much

of an impact from the harsh winter weather, although it's two months in a row that we've had

really unusually harsh winter weather in places that aren't used to having it like the south.

And so it certainly can suppress it, but the biggest impact was really the fact that

we're relying too much on only one sector, one sector that tends to be countercyclical,

and it's a sector that is very dependent on aging demographics in the United States. It would be

much better to see more broad-based gains. We saw

very few gains. The only other sector to show a double-digit increase was financial services

with 10,000 jobs added. We saw jobs in leisure and hospitality shed jobs for the second consecutive

...