The US job market is at least in better shape than it was in when he assumed office, just months after the collapse of Lehmans

So that’s it. The last jobs report of Barack Obama’s presidency has been published and the figures encapsulate his eight-year presidency. Job creation in December was not bad at 156,000, simply a bit mediocre. Better was expected.

In Obama’s defence, he was left the worse possible legacy. The world’s biggest economy was in freefall when he arrived in the White House in early 2009. Lehman Brothers had gone bust six weeks before the November 2008 presidential election and the Federal Reserve had taken emergency action to stimulate growth as fears grew that the clock was about to be turned back to the 1930s.

The full Grapes of Wrath nightmare was avoided, but the economy lost jobs in every month of 2009 and didn’t start to recover until February 2010. Since then, jobs have been created every month.

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It’s hard to overestimate the importance of a strong labour market for the US. The health of the jobs market matters for every country, but more so in the US because by the standards of the developed world, it has a relatively ungenerous welfare state.

So how does Obama’s record stack up? The answer is that it depends on what is measured and what it is measured against.

By the standards of his predecessors in the White House during the seven decades since the end of the second world war, Obama’s record is distinctly modest. The number of employed people increased on average by around 1% a year over his two terms. Only three presidents since 1945 – the two George Bushes and Dwight Eisenhower – have a worse record.

The monthly increase or decrease in non-farm payrolls is a key indicator of the health of the US jobs market, but it is not the only one. Another yardstick, the total labour market participation rate, has been falling steadily since the late 1990s and dropped more steeply under Obama than under George W Bush. The US participation rate is 10 percentage points lower than that of the UK.

As in Britain, the recovery from the financial crisis has recorded weak wage growth, especially during Obama’s first term. The squeeze on real wages has meant the gap between rich and poor has continued to widen.

If the comparison is with other developed countries, the US does better, at least in terms of job creation and unemployment. Donald Trump arrives in the White House with the jobless rate at 4.7%, less than half that of the eurozone, and reasonably close to what the Federal Reserve considers to be full employment.

The main reason for the divergence in labour market performance between the US and Europe over the past eight years is that US policy has been much more strongly skewed towards stimulus.

The guiding principle has been the need to avoid a second Great Depression, while eurozone policy makers have, at least until recently, focused on keeping inflation low.

The Fed was quicker to cut interest rates than the European Central Bank, and years ahead in its willingness to use quantitative easing – bond purchases from the private sector – as a way of creating money. It was a priority for Obama in his first term to sort out the bad-debt problems of US banks. Europe is still struggling with weak banks burdened with non-performing loans.

Would Hillary Clinton have won the 2016 presidential election had Obama’s labour market record been better? Perhaps, although it is worth pointing out that the much stronger jobs and wage growth under Bill Clinton failed to prevent Al Gore losing –admittedly controversially – in 2000.

What can be said is that Obama leaves the US labour market in better shape than he found it, bequeathing Trump a much better legacy than he received himself.