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The U.S. labor market made solid gains again last month, adding 151,000 more jobs just before the biggest

federal layoffs began to hit.

Unemployment crept up to 4.1 percent.

More than 7 million Americans are unemployed.

Manufacturing had its best report in months with 10,000 new jobs, which President

Trump hailed at the White House. We've not only stopped that manufacturing collapse,

but we've begun to rapidly reverse it and get major gains. We created 10,000 manufacturing

jobs in February alone. That hasn't happened

in a long time. And these aren't government jobs, which actually we cut. These are private

sector manufacturing jobs. So we gained all of those jobs, 10,000 jobs, and we barely

started yet. The economy actually last added more, 10,000 jobs, and we barely started yet.

The economy actually last added more than 10,000 manufacturing jobs just a few months ago, back in November of 2024.

But there are other warning signs of what could be ahead, not yet fully captured in this report.

The outplacement firm, Challenger Gray, reported more than 170,000

layoffs last month, more than 62,000 of those from the federal government. That is the highest

monthly total it's reported since 2020. Julia Coronado is an economist at the University of Texas

in Austin, who runs her own firm called Macro Policy Perspectives.

Julia, welcome back to the News Hour. Thanks for joining us.

Thank you. It's my pleasure.

So 151,000 jobs added in February. That is up from 143,000 in January.

How do you look at this report? What do you see?

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