The Daily Rundown   |  March 08, 2013

Upbeat jobs report leads to green arrows on Wall Street

CNBC’s Becky Quick joins for a look at the latest jobs numbers from February as the unemployment rate hit a four-year low.

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This content comes from Closed Captioning that was broadcast along with this program.

>> let's get back to the upbeat jobs report. job gains well over 200,000 in february while the unemployment rate is at a four-year low, leading to a lot of green arrows on wall street . joining me now, becky, what is driving this report internally?

>> there are some keys things here that people would say is a good sign. first of all, construction, the construction gains have been lagging. there was an increase of 48,000 construction jobs in february, and if you look at it, in september construction employment as risen by 151,000. another good thing is the healthcare industry . it continued to add jobs in february at a gain of 32,000. that's good news too. we know that healthcare has been something sticking in there. employment continued to trend up in the retail trade where there was an increase of 24,000. and if you start to dig down in the numbers beneath that there are some good signs as well. that's a key number because as that number starts to tick higher, that's a precursor of when you will really see other companies start to add additional workers because what they do first is try to squeeze more out of the workers they already have, offer them overtime, and when they can't squeeze out more, they start adding more jobs. so this number, the lowest we've seen since december of 2008 . and wall street , this came as a bit of a surprise, we were only looking for a gain of 160,000. and that's why the futures indicate it's sharply higher. right now looks like we're going to open at about 90 points higher. you saw the dow closing as a record level every day this week.

>> and becky, could this be the high water mark before the sequester really kicks in? could this be the last jobs number before the sequester?

>> maybe yes, maybe not. what really came in here, the private sector alone added 246,000. it was the government that brought it down to 236,000. people who are furloughed aren't losing their jobs. it will the hours they worked will come down.

>> cnbc's becky quick , thanks so much for joining us. now