Jobs decrease as employers slow down on hiring.
USA Today reported on the jobs report released this morning:
U.S. employers added 311,000 jobs in February, a slowdown from the prior month’s blockbuster showing but a robust gain that could lead the Federal Reserve to accelerate the pace of interest rate hikes to fight inflation.
The unemployment rate rose from a 54-year low of 3.4% to 3.6%, mostly because the labor force — which includes people working and looking for jobs — swelled by 419,000, the Labor Department said Friday.
Overall the report is not bad but the number of Americans working appears to still be below the number of workers in 2019 per Zerohedge:
This seems to be the most puzzling part of the labor news since 2020. Where did all the workers go? The unemployment rate is low and the number of jobs increasing is high (mostly retail and waiters jobs).
But while the headline payroll number was hotter than expected – driven mostly by retail workers and waiters – the not so good data come from the unemployment rate, which unexpectedly jumped from 3.4% to 3.6%, and above the 3.4% consensus estimate as the number of unemployed workers jumped from 5.694MM to 5.936MM, more than the number of Employed workers (which increased from 160.138MM to 160.315MM), while the labor force increased by 1.7 million workers in the past 3 months.
Overall Zerohedge lays it out as follows:
According to Omair Sharif, founder of Inflation Insights, today’s report is “just what the Fed ordered.”
“This report screams soft landing and looks to be a pretty good one for the Fed.”
If only the US banking sector were screaming the same…