Posted on 12/05/2016 2:46:05 AM PST by expat_panama
The U.S. economy added 178,000 jobs in November as the unemployment rate fell to 4.6%, the lowest since 2007, the Labor Department said Friday morning.
Economists had expected a gain of 170,000 jobs and an unchanged 4.9% jobless rate.
Employers in professional and business services added 63,000 jobs, while health care sector employment rose by 28,000 and construction 19,000. Manufacturing shed 4,000 jobs.
October payroll growth was revised down by 19,000 to 142,000, but that was largely offset by an upward revision to September's job gain of 17,000 to 208,000.
The unemployment rate fell in large part because the labor force participation rate fell...
...Treasury yields have been surging since Election Day on prospects for tax cuts and infrastructure spending, which could stimulate both faster growth and inflation.
A rate hike when the Fed meets on Dec. 14 is seen as a slam dunk. The real question for investors is whether the Fed, which has telegraphed two additional quarter-point rate hikes in 2017 and three in 2018 will have to step up the pace.
Even with the jobless rate sinking, it's hard to draw firm conclusions based on Friday's report. The real questions are whether the drop in participation and October's drop in hourly wages are statistical noise...
...unemployed have fallen by 538,000. Still, participation was up by more than 2.1 million from a year ago.
Meanwhile, there's little evidence to support a sudden drop-off in wage growth...
...a spike in labor demand from the Trump fiscal stimulus could be "a bidding war (for labor), driving up the rate of wage growth, with only a modest rise in participation."
That concern is why he's predicting an upsurge in inflation by the second half of 2018 that puts the brakes on a short-lived Trump boom.
(Excerpt) Read more at investors.com ...
“Practically everything said on this thread so far is wrong, misguided and stupid.”
Are you denying the fact that able bodied workers, those people who would/want work have dropped out of the number of the unemployed? If the current unemployment rate doesn’t even count this population doesn’t the number from the BLS become meaningless? Do you really believe of the 310,000,000 people in the US the amount of folks retired/ not able to or interested in working is 95,000,000?
Don’t call folks wrong, misguided, and stupid without taking a few sentences to explain what the uninformed are missing.
You come off like an asshole.
U-6 is a more accurate unemployment rate.
Per CNBC, "The U-6 rate fell to 9.3 percent in November. The U-6 rate is defined as all unemployed as well as "persons marginally attached to the labor force, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the labor force." That means the unemployed, the underemployed and the discouraged."
Thanks! I was unaware of this as, I suspect, most of America is unaware. Obama touts the under 5% figure. In my day 5% denoted full employments as it was validly believed there is always 5% unable or unwilling to work.
Matbe Mexico and China need to quit watching CNN......
In 2007 with the same unemployment number, labor participation was 66%, compared to 62% now.
exactly that.
And most serious people don’t even look that closely at the Unemployment Rate, because it always has been one where a lot of assumptions have to go into its creation. But that doesn’t mean that the assumptions are cynical, or are intentionally skewed by politically motivated evildoers.
The trajectory of non-farm payrolls, the hours worked and the average wages are the best indicators of whether or not we are getting to a point of tight labor markets.
At 180k a month in employment gains, we have soaked up a lot of the decline in labor participation, but not all of it, and the relatively slack pace of wage gains indicates that we are likely not yet at a place where there are significant inflation risks.
So the job market has improved significantly since the last recession, but we’re not flashing danger signs that the economy is overheating.
I believe the Democrats called that situation “the worst economy since Hoover”.
It's super controversial but taken as a whole this is the same conclusion I come to. My guess is that there are an awful lot of others on the FR who concur, they're just not nearly as noisy as them that don't.
When JED GRAHAM loses his job as a “journalist’ as they are being fired everyday will he think the job market has tighten when he cannot find another job?
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