One of the most encouraging signs for the economy comes from the labor market, believe it or not. Employers added 288,000 jobs in April, the strongest gain since January 2012, and job growth in February and March were revised upward by a total of 36,000. The gains in April were broad-based across sectors, including 32,000 net new jobs in construction.
In addition, not only banks, but also insurance companies, pension funds and ideally the entire financial system, including the shadow banking sector, should be covered in order to effectively help policymakers identify potential sources of systemic risk. Furthermore, data with sufficient granularity are instrumental in macro-prudential analysis in order to take both averages and distributions into account.