While everyone understood that considerable uncertainties--related to economic assumptions and future policy decisions--surrounded these projections, they required that the Federal Reserve take seriously the possibility that monetary policy might have to be conducted without Treasury securities.
All of the 430,000 jobs lost through the recession had been recovered as of early last year, and a further 180,000 jobs have been added since then. Most of the jobs created have been in the private sector and in industries paying above-average wages.1 More recently, unemployment has edged higher, even as the number of job vacancies continued to rise.