The U.S. economy added 223,000 jobs in June. Decent news on job growth but certainly not the picture of an economy about to see inflation skyrocket or growth accelerate.
Today’s report from the U.S. Department of Labor on initial claims for unemployment for the week ended September 6 clarified precisely nothing about the state of the jobs market.
Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen didn’t say anything new in her speech this morning at the Fed’s Jackson Hole conference. That’s pretty much the non-news that the U.S. financial markets were hoping for
In June the U.S. economy added 288,000 jobs after adding an upwardly revised 224,000 jobs in May (up from an initial report of 217,000.) The consensus among economists surveyed by Briefing.com had projected an increase of 210,000 jobs in the month.
May’s gain of 217,000 jobs marked the fourth consecutive month that the economy added more than 200,000. That’s the first consecutive time that’s happened since early 2000. The 6.3% unemployment rate is an almost six-year low. On the other hand, at 6.3% or 12.2% unemployment isn’t especially low, and the labor participation rate remained a puzzle at just 62.8%
Last week the numbers for initial claims for unemployment threw a scare into the financial markets and economists when they showed a strong bump upwards to 344,000 new claims filed for the week. The likelihood was that this was just the usual Easter-related noise in the data but investors and traders could not absolutely rule out the possibility that the labor market had worsened.
The payrolls number shows that the economy added 288,000 jobs in April. That’s a huge piece of good news. But workers fled the workforce in huge numbers with the labor force dropping by 806,000 in the month. That had the effect of lowering the unemployment rate to 6.3% from 6.7% in March. But the number of people actually working in the U.S. economy fell by 73,000.
