September 4, 2026 | Daily JAM, Morning Briefing, Short Term |
The U.S. economy added 162,000 jobs in August, topping all estimates in Bloomberg’s survey of economists. The unemployment rate held steady at 4.1%. The participation rate–the perentage of the population that is working or looking for work–edged up to 61.6% in August, marking the first improvement in almost a year. The Bureau of Labor Statitics revised the jobs totals for both June and July–adding 55,000 jobs to the originlly reported totals. The advance in payrolls was led by a rebound in leisure and hospitality employment and government jobs. Manufacturing payrolls rose by the most since 2023, while construction firms added the most jobs since January. Stocks and bonds fell on the fear that the strong performance increased the odds of a interest rate incrase from the Federal Reserve at its Seotember 16 meeting.
July 2, 2026 | Daily JAM, Morning Briefing |
The U.S. economy added just 57,000 jobs in June, far below economists’ expectations of 100,000 and down from 129,000 jobs in May. The unemployment rate dipped slightly from 4.3% to 4.2%. Average hourly earnings growth for workers registered 3.5 percent on an annual basis in June. Pay raises are not keeping up with prices. Inflation is hovering around 4% on an annual basis after dropping to near 2% in 2024. How you think about this report depends on what part of the data you focus on.
June 5, 2026 | Daily JAM, Morning Briefing, Short Term |
The economy added 172,000 jobs in May, more than economists had expected. The unemployment rate stayed at 4.3%. With revisions, March and April added 93,000 more jobs than previously reported. That puts average job growth in 2026 at about 114,000 per month, much stronger than the 10,000 average last year. That’s much faster than the rate at which people have been coming into the labor market because the Trump administration has squeezed net immigration to near zero.
March 6, 2026 | Daily JAM, Morning Briefing |
The U.S. labor market lost 92,000 jobs in February. The unemployment rate ticked up to 4.4%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Going into the report, economists had predicted that employers added 50,000 jobs last month.
February 7, 2026 | Daily JAM |
Thanks to the latest government shutdown, short as it was, the January jobs report on Wednesday and the Consumer Price Index (CPI) inflation report, due Friday, are unusually close together. Normally, the jobs report lands on a Friday and the CPI report comes the following week.
The jobs report will have even more clout than usual. In addition to the monthly payrolls and unemployment numbers, each January release includes an annual revision to the jobs count. The benchmark update is expected to reveal a notable decrease in job growth in the year through March 2025.
January 9, 2026 | Daily JAM, Morning Briefing |
Payrolls were up 50,000 last month and the unemployment rate ticked down a tenth to 4.4% from November’s revised rate of 4.5%. Revisions to payroll growth were negative, with combined October and November totals marked down 78,000. Over the past three months, overall monthly gains have averaged a loss of 22,000 jobs, due to federal government job losses. The private sector jobs market isn’t a whole lot stronger with the comparable average for the private sector at a low 29,000 per month.
December 24, 2025 | Daily JAM |
Initial claims for unemployment fell last week with initial claims decreasing by 10,000 to 214,000, the Labor Department reported Wednesday. The median forecast in a Bloomberg survey of economists called for 224,000 initial claims.
Continuing claims, the number of people already receiving benefits, rose to 1.92 million in the previous week,
November 20, 2025 | Daily JAM |
Jobs in the health care and social assistance and leisure and hospitality sectors have risen by a combined 690,000 so far in 2025, according to the latest monthly jobs report published Thursday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Excluding those two, total U.S. employment has declined by about 6,000 this year. In other words, 100% of new jobs in the United States this year have come from healthcare and hospitality.
October 1, 2025 | Daily JAM, Morning Briefing |
The news from the ADP private sector employment survey this morning wasn’t good. Private-sector payrolls decreased by 32,000 in September and the August numbers were revised lower to show a 3,000 decline. The number of jobs lost in September exceeded all estimates in Bloomberg’s survey of economists.
September 9, 2025 | Daily JAM, Morning Briefing |
The U.S. labor market was much weaker during much of 2024 and early 2025 than data initially showed, revised figures forty last year show. In the largest preliminary revision to jobs data on record, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said employers had created 911,000 fewer positions from April 2024 to March 2025 than previously reported. That’s less than half as many as the agency had initially indicated. The data will be revised again and finalized early next year. The typical pattern in these revisions would reverse part of today’s drop in the final revision.
September 5, 2025 | Daily JAM, Morning Briefing |
Today’s dismal jobs report–and the shocking downward revision for June–may have marked an inflection point for this market: the point where soft job numbers changed from being a good thing because they heralded an interest rate cut from the Federal Reserve to worries that the job market was so slow that it might be signaling a recession ahead. The economy added 22,000 jobs in August, far fewer than expected, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday morning. The unemployment rate ticked up to 4.3%, the highest since late 2021.
The downward revisions for June were brutal. Job data from June was revised downward to show the loss of 13,000 jobs, the first time the economy has lost jobs since December 2020, in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic.
September 1, 2025 | Daily JAM, Morning Briefing |
Expect another critical jobs report on Friday from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The report comes a little less than two weeks before the Federal Reserve meets on interest rates on September 17. Economists project that the economy added 75,000 jobs in August and that the unemployment rate ticked up to 4.3%. in the month from 4.2% in July. The four straight months of sub-100,000 payrolls growth would mark the weakest stretch since the onset of the pandemic in 2020.
