Yesterday we saw a staggering jobs number that the ordinary Aussie couldn’t give a flying fig about, but a 0.5% drop in the unemployment rate is a BIG deal. Failing some statistical screw up by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, this result gives weight to my argument that I advanced back on 15 June last year that we could be looking at a rerun of the Roaring 20s of the 1920s!

By the way, this didn’t come from my self-generated brilliance but from my ability to tap into my network of very smart men and women who continually feed me interesting stuff. In fact, my competitive advantage (and I guess skill) is that I benefit from being able to see the consensus view on many important economic and market matters but I also get to see the outliers.

And sometimes it’s the outliers who have insights that can make a difference when it comes to picking stocks or determining how the economy is set to perform. That’s what we try to unearth with our investing newsletter —The Switzer Report — and our Switzer Investing TV show.

This Roaring 20s idea came from Morgans chief economist, Michael Knox, and while he can be a little too smart for normal people to listen to, after I get through with him we can usually see his bottom line conclusion. To be honest, a Knoxy interview in late July made me write that he was seeing our dollar head towards 80 US cents and that’s when the currency was 72 US cents, so he does have good form.

I seized upon his Roaring 20s argument when I factored in the observations of Coolabah Capital’s Chris Joye, who argued on my programmes and in his AFR columns, at the early stage of the pandemic that the infection and death rates were going to be the most important data trends to watch for the economy.

He got his team of pointy-headed smarties to stop watching the bond markets, which is their speciality to watch the trends in infections. His team called the success here in Australia before anyone. And this gave me confidence to predict that buying hard into this stock market rebound was a sensible idea.

And Chris and his team also predicted that vaccinations would come earlier than most new outlets. This too gave me and for that matter my readers, viewers and subscribers an advantage that I’m always looking to deliver.

But being an economist by training, I love the fact that all this smart stuff from smart people has actually predicted the economic comeback that not only will underpin rising share prices this year and next but will create jobs, make businesses more profitable and even help deal with one area that doomsday merchants love to point to — the remaining debt!

And while it’s a big issue, the more we get growth — Roaring 20s style — the more easily we’ll be able to deal with the debt dramas ahead.

Big growth leads to big tax collections and reduced need for government spending on things like the dole, which brings deficits down. That said, there will be economic troubles because of this huge spending programme to beat the Coronavirus-created recession but to all those whingers out there, I say: “Person up!”

(“Man up” is not only discriminatory, it ignores how tough women can be on many matters of life!)

Australia’s public debt as a percentage is about the lowest in the Western World and about half that of the USA.

And we hold the record for the longest growing economy without a recession, so if any country can carry debt and pay it down to acceptable levels it is us!

Those job numbers underline how good our economy is and how great the performance of the National Cabinet was in beating the virus and the recession.

Here’s a summary of the great job stats from yesterday:

• 88,700 jobs created in February while the consensus was expecting a 30,000 lift.
• This means that virtually all the jobs lost during March-May 2020 (the peak of COVID-19 restrictions in Australia) have been regained (or 99.8% of jobs to be exact). 
• This means that the recovery in employment has taken just 9 months to complete, which is extremely fast compared to prior recessions.
• The unemployment rate went down by 0.5 percentage points to 5.8%, which is still higher than the 5% level it was at before COVID-19, but it’s heading down faster than economists and the RBA had been expecting. 
• The RBA thought unemployment would be 6% by year’s end!

This is a HUGE result. It screams that we’re going to roar ahead over the next couple of years. And we won’t be alone, with the Federal Reserve boss, Jerome Powell telling us yesterday that the US is expected to grow at a huge 6.5% this year. That’s roaring, BIG TIME!

We've relaunched our Thursday YouTube show as with a new format. If you're a fan of our Monday YouTube show (or the old Switzer show on the Sky News Business Channel), click here to watch the latest episode.