Posted on 01/04/2018 7:36:56 AM PST by SeekAndFind
U.S. private employers stepped up hiring in December and planned layoffs by American-based companies fell sharply, pointing to sustained labor market strength that likely keeps the Federal Reserve on course to increase interest rates in March.
Other data on Thursday showed a third straight weekly rise in first-time applications for unemployment benefits, though that probably reflected volatility around the end-of-year holidays.
The Labor Department said claims data for some states, including California, Massachusetts, North Carolina and Virginia, had been estimated. The labor market is near full employment, with the jobless rate at a 17-year low of 4.1 percent.
“Higher jobless claims are not signaling a slowdown in the economy, that’s for sure,” said Chris Rupkey, chief economist at MUFG in New York. “The labor market looks strong and the outlook for 2018 is even better.”
The ADP Research Institute said private payrolls increased by 250,000 jobs in December, the biggest gain since March, and well above economists’ expectations for a rise of 190,000.
The ADP National Employment Report is jointly developed with Moody’s Analytics.
The gains in employment were broad-based last month. Manufacturing payrolls rose by 9,000 and employment in the construction sector increased by 16,000. The service-providing industries added another 222,000 jobs last month.The ADP report was released ahead of the Labor Department’s more comprehensive employment report on Friday. According to a Reuters survey of economists, nonfarm payrolls probably rose by 190,000 jobs in December after a gain of 228,000 in November.
The tightening labor market encouraged the Fed to raise interest rates three times last year despite inflation persistently undershooting the U.S. central bank’s 2 percent target.
Minutes of the Fed’s Dec. 12-13 policy meeting published on Wednesday showed officials upbeat about the economy and labor market prospects. They viewed economic activity as “rising at a solid rate,”
(Excerpt) Read more at reuters.com ...
This must of pained Reuters.
What I like to know is this — THE LABOR PARTICIPATION RATE.
Is this rate increasing or not? If not, then all these unemployment number MASKS a hidden unemployment that we are not talking about.
“What I like to know is this — THE LABOR PARTICIPATION RATE.”
Exactly! During the zippy years, that number showed the falseness of the administration’s unemployment numbers and faux-success. If those numbers are not either going down, or stabilizing, they are as stated MASKING a statistic not talked about.
KYPD
What would the unemployment rate be if we got rid of the H-1B visa workers, the work visas for the H-1B spouses, and got rid of all the illegals?
We have stopped the bleeding:
https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS11300000
Improvement appears small, but noticeable.
C’mon man…..let’s start calling it the “Trump Boom. A slap in the face to the lying Dems who want to credit the financial flop, Obama, with this booming recovery from his failed economic policies.
Yep, that "jobless claims up" sub-header was thrown in there to confuse the reader, and to wipe that smug look off the face of Trumpsters.
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