Evidence suggests economic recovery gaining speed

The U.S. economy is like a flywheel: It takes a lot to get it going. Once it starts moving, it can pick up speed pretty quickly.

To see why, look no further than Friday’s jobs report, which offered convincing evidence that the U.S. recovery is finally gaining momentum.

After months of subpar growth in their payrolls, American companies added 243,000 new jobs in January, considerably more than the 150,000 that forecasters expected. That drove the unemployment rate down from 8.5 percent in December to 8.3 percent, extending a rapid decline from 9.1 percent last August.

Since last fall, a series of economic reports have pointed to gradual improvement. But the January employment report tore the cover off the ball.

“It’s very unusual to get an unambiguous jobs report; usually you have a lot of cross currents in the data,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Analytics. “This is unambiguous. Everything is good.”

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