WILL America be fourth time lucky? A better-than-expected jobs report for April has soothed fears that the economy was swooning, as it has in the spring or summer of each of the last three years. The relief sent the Dow Jones Industrial Average over 15,000 and the S&P 500 over 1,600 for the first time. Non-farm payroll jobs rose 165,000 in April from March, and the two prior months were revised up by a hefty 114,000. The unemployment rate fell from 7.6% to 7.5%, the lowest since December, 2008. It also fell for the right reasons: more people working rather than fewer people looking for work. The household survey, which often yields different (and less reliable) results from the payroll survey, showed the number of employed people rose 293,000.

Combined with last week’s sharp, and unexpected, decline in first time claims for unemployment benefits and the stubborn optimism of equity investors, the April jobs report strongly suggests the recovery has not stalled.

But I would not take great comfort in this report. First, even with the revisions, job creation has clearly decelerated; the gains in March and April are both below the six-month average of 208,000. The economy’s recent hiccup was not some statistical artifact of the March employment report: it has showed up in retail sales, industrial production, and housing starts, and has continued into April with automobile sales and manufacturing activity. Moreover, the slowdown is global, with manufacturing activity stalling even in former stalwarts like China and Germany. More than half the companies in the S&P 500 to report so far this quarter have missed analysts’ expectations for sales, according to Thomson Reuters IBES.

Second, the details of the April employment report offer little hope the economy has accelerated from its recent 2% pace. More people have jobs, but they are working fewer hours: the private work week fell to 34.4 hours from 34.6 (though this might partly be due to cold weather), and the manufacturing work week slipped 0.1 hours, pointing to a drop in industrial production the same month. In the two most cyclically sensitive sectors, construction employment actually slipped and factory employment didn’t grow at all. All of the job growth was in services, although the advance in retail employment was a somewhat heartening sign that consumer spending is holding up. Average hourly earnings rose a paltry 0.2% from March and 1.9% from a year earlier. Tepid earnings and hours growth means total income is barely growing. Workers do not seem to see an abundance of job opportunities: the labour force participation rate (those who want to work as a share of the population) remained stuck at 63.3%, the lowest in over three decades.

In sum, America’s economy shows modest underlying strength held back by tighter fiscal policy, most importantly the sharp rise in taxes in January. It’s hard to find any effect yet from the sequester, which starting March 1st slices $85 billion from federal spending by September 30th. Government payrolls slipped, but by no more than the recent trend, and the Bureau of Labour Statistics does not report a work week for the government which would capture furloughs. Some might attribute April’s rise in part-time employment as evidence either of furloughs or employers cutting full time workers to avoid the Obamacare requirement to provide them with health insurance. But the part time share of total employment has shown no meaningful trend over the last year, and is actually lower than two years ago.

There is little reason to expect the economy to accelerate in the near term. Barack Obama desperately wants to scrap the sequester, but unless congressmen heard a groundswell of protest in their districts during this week’s recess, they are unlikely to return to Washington motivated to fix it. The Federal Reserve had expected to start tapering off quantitative easing (QE), under which it buys $85 billion of government bonds a month with newly created money. The March air pocket prompted it to reconsider, and this past week it opened the door to ramping up QE. But the April report does not show the sort of stall that would prompt the Fed to pull the trigger. The year 2013 has so far held less economic drama than 2012, 2011 or 2010, but it has not given any reason to expect the final result to be different.