From the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal, this is Potomac Watch.

U.S. employers at a quarter of a million new jobs on net, Bitcoin hits $100,000, and inflation

is still stubbornly stuck above 2%. Let's check in on the state of the economy with a little over a month

to go until President Trump takes over from Biden next year on January 20th. Welcome, I'm Kyle Peterson

with the Wall Street Journal. We're joined today by my colleagues, columnist Alicia Finley,

and editorial board member Manet Uquay-Bruwa.

On Friday, the Labor Department released its latest monthly jobs report, this one covering

November and showing steady growth in net employment.

The overall number is non-farm payroll, up by $227,000 on net in November, 54,000 jobs in health care,

53,000 in leisure and hospitality, 33,000 in government. That tends to be a pretty steady number,

at least in recent months. Alicia, would you add this to the evidence that we have

seen lately, including Bitcoin hitting $100,000, the Dow Jones Industrial Average being near

$45,000? The evidence that the economy and financial conditions are not as tight as some seem to

think, particularly as the Fed considers potentially cutting interest rates.

Well, I think this jobs report, there's a little bit of a noise because it's mostly bounced back

from the last jobs report, if you call there were some storms in October, and the employer

survey was actually kind of disrupted by the storms. And so you actually saw

quite low job creation for that month. And then you also had the Boeing strike. So the 227,

despite the balance back, is actually a little lower than job creation than was earlier this

year. We've got average around 180,000 for the last three months.

And it's steady as she goes, right? So it's not a bad job number. It's not like the job or the labor

market is super tight either. This is kind of where you think is it's in the Goldie lock zone for the

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