Ground Floor: We're back to talking about jobless recoveries in the US again following a dismal non-farm payroll number of just 21,000 jobs in February against analysts' forecasts of gains of around 130,000.

Not only that but January's numbers were revised downwards marginally too, from 112,000 to 97,000. All of which isn't exactly great news for George W and the domestic economy.

Everyone is still scratching their heads about why it is that employment hasn't picked up. Alan Greenspan commented that the economy was showing increasing signs of recovery but that job creation was lagging badly. Further comments from the Fed chairman seem to indicate that he believes that increases in productivity have had the unwelcome side effect of putting a lid on job creation.

So all of those productivity gains that were made in the 1990s at the urging of employers everywhere - and which spurred businesses on to greater growth - are now a real pain in the neck for policymakers! And now the Fed is actually hoping that growth in productivity will slow down so that the economy can put on a few new jobs.

Actually, what's worse is not so much that there are no new jobs - because there are. It's just that the jobs seem to be migrating to cheaper centres of labour, mainly the Far East. At the moment, there doesn't seem to be any plan to stop this happening and, indeed, there isn't any great plan that could stop it from happening either.

The US, like just about every western industrialised economy, is a relatively expensive place in which to do business, despite its swathes of cheap labour. According to the statistics, the US has lost 2.3 million jobs over the past three years, which is something that the administration doesn't want to talk about very much.

Of course, when the statistics continue to cause worry and uncertainty, analysts begin to question the numbers themselves. It's the same as every time we look at above- average inflation here and questions are asked about the basket of goods we use to calculate it. Are they still relevant? Are they giving a misleading picture? Are things (by any remote chance!) better than we think?

In fact, the US non-farm payroll data are regularly revised and each time there is a general belief that they have underestimated the number of jobs in the economy, possibly due to the fact that they don't immediately include new companies. There are also other surveys which measure jobs differently and which usually come up with greater numbers than the non-farm payroll.

But it's the payroll number which has iconic status in the whole panoply of statistics and so it's the payroll number that matters when we're talking about Americans at work. In which case, the worry for policymakers is that if jobs don't grow and people don't earn more money, they won't spend the kind of dosh needed to ensure that still more jobs come on stream it's the vicious circle all over again.

Meantime, whether they're at work or not, they're still buying goods. Retail sales rose 0.6 per cent in February and most retailers claim that their sales numbers are exceeding their own forecasts. Commentators suggest that the reason consumers are buying more is as a result of the tax cuts.

But where are they buying from? Another number causing a sharp intake of breath last week was the trade deficit, wider again at $43.1 billion (€35.2 billion) and greater than the $42.7 billion that most experts were predicting.

To be fair, part of the problem with the deficit was that meat and poultry exports were hit by the outbreaks of mad cow disease and bird flu while the cost of imported oil was at its highest in a year; so these particular numbers may be partly explained by issues other than by Americans rushing out to buy more imported goods. But the deficit is still a big problem for the US and one which they don't seem to have any desire to tackle.

Does it matter once enough people are confident in the ability of the States to spend its way back to economic and jobs growth? You'd think it would, but as long as those same countries which are winning jobs from the States continue to invest their money back there, then everyone is happy. Or if not exactly happy, they'll continue to talk things up and hope to God that the emperor is wearing some clothes.

Despite the spending, consumer confidence has fallen for the second month in a row based, in part, on those same job concerns. Because Americans themselves aren't seeing a big pick-up in employment data, they're concerned about their own jobs and less confident about the future.

Since so much of the market's psychology is based on confidence, the concern is that if consumers actually start to worry, the whole deck of cards could come tumbling down.

Confidence took another hit, of course, in the wake of the Madrid bombings. I was in Spain myself at the time and was naturally somewhat less concerned with the effect such a terrible act had on the world's business markets than with the very real grief felt by the Spanish people for the victims of terrorism in their country.

None of our economic analysing will make the slightest bit of difference to those people whose ordinary lives are visited by terror.