The American economy added 222,000 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 132,000 jobs. That’s a decent number, about equal to the average of the past three years. The headline unemployment rate ticked up slightly to 4.4 percent, but that’s probably because a lot of new grads entered the labor force in June and haven’t yet found jobs.
Hourly earnings of production and nonsupervisory employees went up at an annual rate of 2.3 percent. Inflation has been declining for the past couple of months, so this represents a small increase on an annualized basis. Nothing to write home about, but at least it’s positive. All in all, this was a pretty positive report with no real downsides.
