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The American economy added 255,000 new jobs last month, 90,000 of which were needed to keep up with population growth. This means that net job growth clocked in at a very robust 165,000 jobs. The number of short-term unemployed dropped sharply, but the number of longer-term unemployed increased. Overall, the unemployment rate held steady at 4.9 percent.
And there was more good news: hourly earnings of production and nonsupervisory employees increased at an annual rate of about 4 percent compared to last month. That’s not bad at all. We’re now in the silly season when all of these numbers will be politicized, but there’s really no way to make the July jobs numbers look bad. This is a very solid report.
