By PAUL WISEMAN

Associated Press – Defying a pandemic and supply chain disruptions, the U.S. economy has cranked out more than 400,000 jobs every month for nearly a year — a blazing winning streak in wildly uncertain times.

And despite surging inflation, the hiring wave likely continued last month in the face of yet another jolt: Russia’s war in Ukraine, which has unsettled the economic outlook and catapulted gasoline prices to painful levels.

Economists surveyed by the data firm FactSet expect the Labor Department’s jobs report for March to show that employers added 478,000 jobs and that the unemployment rate dipped from 3.8% to 3.7%. That would mark the lowest unemployment rate since just before the pandemic struck two years ago, when joblessness reached a 50-year low of 3.5%.

The government will issue the March jobs report at 8:30 a.m. Eastern time Friday.

“With the war in Ukraine, economic uncertainty rising and surging energy prices, we may see a modest slowdown in hiring in March,” said Daniel Zhao, senior economist at the jobs website Glassdoor. “However, employer demand remains strong, which should sustain a healthy level of hiring.″

The booming U.S. job market reflects a robust rebound from the brief but devastating coronavirus recession, which wiped out 22 million jobs in March and April 2020 as businesses shut down or cut hours and Americans stayed home to avoid infection.

But the recovery has been swift. Fueled by generous federal aid, savings amassed during the pandemic and ultra-low borrowing rates engineered by the Federal Reserve, U.S. consumers have spent so fast that many factories, warehouses, shipping companies and ports have failed to keep pace with their customer demand. Supply chains have snarled, forcing up prices.

As the pandemic has eased, consumers have been broadening their spending beyond goods to services, such as health care, travel and entertainment, which they had long avoided during the worst of the pandemic. The result: Inflation is running at 40-year highs, causing hardships for many lower-income households that face sharp increases for such necessities as food, gasoline and rent.

It’s unclear whether the economy can maintain its momentum of the past year. The government relief checks are gone. The Fed raised its benchmark short-term interest rate two weeks ago and will likely keep raising it well into next year. Those rate hikes will result in more expensive loans for many consumers and businesses.

Inflation has also eroded consumers’ spending power: Hourly pay, adjusted for higher consumer prices, fell 2.6% in February from a year earlier — the 11th straight month in which inflation has outpaced year-over-year wage growth. According to AAA, average gasoline prices, at $4.23 a gallon, are up a dizzying 47% from a year ago.

Squeezed by inflation, some consumers are paring their spending. The Commerce Department reported Thursday that consumer spending rose just 0.2%% in February — and fell 0.4% when adjusted for inflation — down from a 2.7% increase in January.

Still, the job market has kept hurtling ahead. Employers posted a near-record 11.3 million positions in February. Nearly 4.4 million Americans quit their jobs, a sign of confidence that they could find something better.

“We’re still seeing a very tight labor market,” said Karen Fichuk, CEO of the staffing company Randstad North America, who noted that the United States now has a record 1.7 job openings for every unemployed person.

Even so, so many jobs were lost in 2020 that the economy still remains more than 2 million shy of the number it had just before the pandemic struck. Over the past year, employers have added an average of 556,000 jobs a month. At that pace — no guarantee to continue — the nation would recover all the jobs lost to the pandemic by June. (That still wouldn’t include all the additional hiring that would have been done over the past two years under normal circumstances.)

Brighter job prospects are beginning to draw back into the labor force people who had remained on the sidelines because of health concerns, difficulty finding or affording daycare, generous unemployment benefits that have now expired or other reasons.

Over the past year, 3.6 million people have joined the U.S. labor force, meaning they now either have a job or are looking for one. But their ranks are still nearly 600,000 short of where they stood in February 2020, just before the pandemic slammed into the economy.

By EMILY WAGSTER PETTUS AND JONATHAN MATTISE

AP – A line of severe storms packing isolated tornadoes and high winds ripped across the Deep South overnight, toppling trees and power lines and leaving homes and businesses damaged as the vast weather front raced across several states.

At least two confirmed tornadoes injured several people Wednesday, damaged homes and businesses and downed power lines in Mississippi and Tennessee after earlier storm damage in Arkansas, Missouri and Texas.

About 185,000 customers were without electricity Thursday morning in the wake of the storm along a band of states: Mississippi and Alabama, Tennessee and Kentucky, Indiana and Ohio and Michigan, according to poweroutage.us, which tracks utilities.

The worst of the weather Thursday morning appeared to be at the southern end of the storm front, which was expected to bring heavy rain and high winds all along the U.S. East Coast later in the day. Much of the Florida Panhandle was under a tornado watch, according to the National Weather Service in Tallahassee.

No deaths had been reported from the storms as of early Thursday, authorities said. But widespread damage was reported in the Jackson, Tennessee, area as a tornado warning was in effect. “Significant damage” occurred to a nursing home near Jackson-Madison County General Hospital and the Madison County Sheriff’s Office in Jackson, said Madison County Emergency Management Director Jason Moore.

In Nashville, Tennessee, paneling fell five stories from the side of a downtown hotel Wednesday evening and onto a roof of a building below. The fire department warned the debris could become airborne as high winds continued, and some hotel guests were moved to other parts of the building due to concerns that the roof would become unstable. No injuries were immediately associated with the collapse.

Elsewhere, a warehouse roof collapsed as the storms moved through Southaven, Mississippi, near Memphis, police said. The building had been evacuated and no injuries were reported.

The Mississippi Senate suspended its work Wednesday as weather sirens blared during a tornado watch in downtown Jackson. Some employees took shelter in the Capitol basement.

Rander P. Adams said he and his wife, Janice Delores Adams, were in their home near downtown Jackson when severe weather blew through during a tornado warning Wednesday afternoon. He said their lights flashed and a large window exploded just feet from his wife as she tried to open their front door.

“The glass broke just as if someone threw a brick through it,” he said. “I advised her then, ‘Let’s go to the back of the house.’”

Adams said the storm toppled trees in a nearby park, and a large tree across the street from their house split in half. “We were blessed,” he said. “Instead of falling toward the house, it fell the other way.”

Earlier Wednesday, a tornado that struck Springdale, Arkansas, and the adjoining town of Johnson, about 145 miles (235 kilometers) northwest of Little Rock, about 4 a.m. injured seven people, two critically, said Washington County, Arkansas, Emergency Management Director John Luther.

The National Weather Service said that tornado would be rated “at least EF-2,” which would mean wind speeds reached 111-135 mph (178-217 kph).

“Search and rescue teams have been deployed, as there are significant damages and injuries,” Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson said.

In northwest Missouri, an EF-1 tornado with wind speeds around 90 mph (145 kph) struck St. Joseph on Tuesday night, damaging two homes. Another EF-1 tornado with wind speeds around 100 mph (160 kph) touched down briefly before dawn Wednesday in a rural subdivision east of Dallas, damaging two roofs, the weather service reported.

The storms come a week after a tornado in a New Orleans-area neighborhood carved a path of destruction during the overnight hours and killed a man.

Strong winds in Louisiana overturned semitrailers, peeled the roof from a mobile home, sent a tree crashing into a home and knocked down power lines, according to weather service forecasters, who didn’t immediately confirm any tornadoes in the state.

Firefighters, meanwhile, have been trying to get handle on a wildfire spreading near Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee, amid mandatory evacuations as winds whipped up ahead of the approaching storm front.

The fire, which was not contained, had expanded to about 250 acres (more than 100 hectares) as of Wednesday afternoon. One person was injured, and a plume of smoke rose above one community not far from where 2016 wildfires ravaged the tourism town of Gatlinburg, killing 14 people and damaging or destroying about 2,500 buildings.

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Wagster Pettus reported from Jackson, Miss., and Mattise from Nashville, Tennessee; many other Associated Press journalists contributed to this report.