from WNYC Studios. I'm Brian Lehrer. This is my daily politics podcast. It's Monday, April 8th.

We'll talk about the U.S. economy now and connect it to the presidential election year.

The economy in most elections is issue number one,

and in case you missed it, the jobs report for March came out on Friday and once again exceeded

economists' expectations with a net gain of more than 303,000 jobs.

So we have headlines like these.

From the AP, another month of robust U.S. job growth points to

continued economic strength from Axios. The March jobs report was as good as it gets. Here's

why. And the first reason that they gave is that unemployment has remained below 4% for 26 months

from NPR. Construction hiring booms in overall strong jobs report.

The lead line in the Wall Street Journal story was, the U.S. economy is rapidly adding jobs,

but not in a very inflationary way. And from ABC, hinting at the political connection,

blockbuster jobs report flexes economic strength defying Americans' lukewarm attitudes. So those are some representative headlines from

Friday. Of course, those lukewarm attitudes tend to be connected to inflation and interest

rates, even as people have jobs, get paid and are spending quite a bit,

according to stats from the government. So let's try to figure out what it all means,

economically and politically, with Megan Cassella, CNBC correspondent covering the intersection of

Wall Street and Washington. She's also covering Treasury Secretary

Yellen's trip to China, and we'll talk about that too. Megan, thanks for coming on. Welcome

to WNMRC today. Thanks so much for having me. Happy to be here. Can you start with more about the

jobs report? I saw expectations were for about 200,000 net new jobs in March, and it came in at more than 300,000.

Where were the biggest surprises?

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