The American economy gained 236,000 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 146,000 jobs. The headline unemployment rate ticked down slightly to 3.5%.
Overall this is a decent but not great report: labor participation is up, the number of unemployed workers is down, and 320,000 new people entered the labor force. On the other hand, there's also this:
The number of new jobs has been steadily decreasing for more than two years now. The economy is still OK, but hardly booming.
Average weekly earnings for blue-collar workers were up 3.9% on an annualized basis. Adjusted for inflation, this is a drop of 1.0%.
Powell is finally getting the results he wanted.
A couple more good kicks in the head to the economy and he might even manage to re-elect Donnie.
Powell just needs to hike rates once every other month till Nov '24 and he'll be taking vacations even Clarence Thomas will be jealous of.
"Overall this is a decent but not great report."
3.5% unemployment, even with labor participation up... and it's just meh? If this had happened under a Republican president, we'd be hearing about Morning in America for months.
Looks like Krugman disagrees with Kevin. I lean more towards Krugman than Kevin. I’ve posted this before, but it doesn’t hurt to say it again. The economy before the pandemic was so strange. Every month the employment report would indicate several positive things about the economy and several negative things. Over and over this happened, but the US just kept chugging along.
The world situation is more unpredictable today, so I don’t know what will happen. Yet looking at Kevin’s chart of job growth going back to 2018, I say our current situation compares quite well.
One thing I wish Kevin would post is legal immigration over the past 12 months compared to 2018 and 2019. I have no idea if we are still attracting legal immigration (and naturalization) like we used to or if we are going to start running out of workers.