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The American economy added 151,000 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 modest 61,000 jobs. Both the number of workers and the number of unemployed increased, and the headline unemployment rate stayed steady at 4.9 percent. Labor force participation was unchanged. Overall, this was a weak but not unusual jobs report.
Hourly earnings of production and nonsupervisory employees were up at an annual rate of about 2.3 percent compared to last month. That’s nothing to write home about, but given our very low inflation rate at the moment, it’s not bad.
