June Jobs Report: Payrolls Miss Big at 57,000 Added
U.S. job creation fell well short of forecasts in June, with only 57,000 new payrolls and unemployment dipping to 4.2%.
If you were hoping for a strong jobs report to ease your economic jitters, June had other plans. The U.S. economy added just 57,000 nonfarm payrolls last month — that's less than half of what economists were expecting. Forecasters had penciled in a gain of around 115,000 jobs, so this miss is pretty hard to ignore.
On the unemployment side, there's a small silver lining: the jobless rate actually ticked down to 4.2%, compared to the 4.3% that analysts had predicted it would hold at. So fewer people are technically counted as unemployed, even though the economy clearly didn't generate nearly as many new positions as hoped. It's one of those head-scratching moments where the two main job-market numbers seem to be telling slightly different stories.
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What does a number like 57,000 really mean in plain English? Think of it this way — the U.S. labor force has hundreds of millions of people, and adding fewer than 60,000 jobs in a month is barely keeping pace, let alone making real progress. A healthy month typically looks closer to 150,000 to 200,000 new jobs, so this print is well below what most economists consider solid growth territory.
The big question now is whether this is a one-month blip or the start of a slower hiring trend. Markets and policymakers at the Federal Reserve will be watching closely, since weak job creation can influence decisions about interest rates. A softening labor market could add pressure on the Fed to reconsider its current stance — though one data point alone rarely changes the whole playbook.
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