The American economy gained 206,000 jobs last month. We need 90,000 new jobs just to keep up with population growth, which means that net job growth clocked in at 116,000 jobs. The headline unemployment rate increased to 4.1%.
This was a fairly ordinary employment report with no special gotchas to report. It's basically an extension of the gradual slowdown in the labor market that we've seen over the past couple of years.
Average weekly wages were up 3.5% on an annualized basis even though there was no inflation in May. I don't imagine the Fed will be excited by this.
Jobs continue to grow and wages are rising in an environment where prices are steady. But is that really the win Joe Biden thinks it is?
The New York Times isn't so sure...
It would be nice if the Fed did a .25 point cut next month or september. if not they'll be behind the curve yet again
May I suggest, if you're looking for trends, % change from one year ago applied to monthly new jobs might be useful.
The earliest instance of that assertion I can find is in https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2012/01/chart-day-net-jobs-december/ from January of 2012 referring to December 2011.
Per https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/POPTHM the population of the United States was ~313.5 million in December 2011. Per that same source, their most recent population figure is ~336.7 million for May 2024. A population increase of ~7.4%. So why isn't the number of new jobs needed closer to 96,600?
Because a certain percentage of people counted in the population growth are not working age or are otherwise not needing or looking for a job?
Fine, but at least _some_ of that increase in population would be people of working age.
On the subject of working-age population, per https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LFWA64TTUSM647S the working-age population of the United States was 200.3 million people. In May 2024 it is given as ~208.8 million people. So the working age population has increased by 4.2% over that interval.
And it isn't entirely clear that Kevin's post from January 2012 was the first to use the 90,000 figure. Fun with search and how Mother Jones chooses to organize things. There are >> 999 "pages" of Kevin Drum posts, but their "page" URL notation doesn't go beyond page 999.
"A population increase of ~7.4%. So why isn't the number of new jobs needed closer to 96,600?" Without your data I would have assume Kevin was wrong. But the birthrate has fallen by more than 7.4% in that time period so kevin woud appear to have been smarter than me.
Perhaps there's a simple explanation, but I can't understand how the unemployment rate can be rising if the number of newly-employed people keeps exceeding population growth and the labor force participation rate remains unchanged.
If I remember my decades-ago excursion into these arcana, the main US unemployment statistic factors in people actively seeking a paying job, so if all other numbers in month 2 are exactly the same as in month 1, but more people say they're looking for work, the headline unemployment number goes up. Which of course means that in some circumstances rising unemployment numbers can accompany a growing and/or improving economy.
There are something like half a dozen official unemployment stats and at least some of them don't do this, but iirc the one that's always quoted does. And again iirc most countries outside the US don't do it this way.
Hard to know what the economy will do between now and November. The revisions of job numbers for the past two months were down by a lot. There are a lot of numbers you can look at to see if the economy is going to crash or grow. The one I always look at to determine how we are doing RIGHT NOW is employment-population ratio for the key working age group: 25 to 54 years old (the chart is from calculatedriskblog.com):
https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgl5ObbBNt8eGiWjX8yk1501y_eykDu-vBNwgAPvpjV2aiFGX2DaBe9IzW1nqHTVL-CJQaclIQXmOHUIAwKpxIqcqBFtrqLadbuL41R_XTu4CFIIAa9zFfhfrD1JUSmZOQ523Jk4ZHFeZBpaV_gKBH-6YAre6vIY_bZXg264hmfrw6ahHOBpJqJ/s1064/EmployPop2554June2024.PNG
The blue line is the percent working - around the highest since 2001 and higher than 2019. The red line is the number of employed plus the number looking for work. This is flat out the highest since 2001.
Hiring IS down, but so far things are pretty damn good.