2023-05-06 04:38:12
In April, 253,000 jobs were created, the Labor Department announced on Friday, compared to 165,000 in March – a figure revised down sharply.
Employment remains up in business services, health care, recreation and hospitality, as well as social care, a statement said.
As for the unemployment rate, it fell further, and fell to 3.4% (-0.1 point), as in January, its lowest level since 1969. Analysts had forecast 180,000 job creations and an unemployment rate at 3.6%, according to several consensuses.
US President Joe Biden hailed the numbers in a tweet: “My program for investing in America is working.”
A decline in job creation and a rise in the unemployment rate are however expected to manage to curb inflation. This, still very strong, had been fueled, among other things, by the significant growth in wages linked to the lack of manpower.
Wages thus continued to climb in April, but a little more slowly. The increase in the average hourly wage is 4.4% over one year, to 33.36 dollars, once morest 4.6% last month.
Job creations in the private sector alone, published on Wednesday, had set the tone, defying forecasts, with 296,000 jobs created once morest 142,000 the previous month, according to the monthly ADP / Stanford Lab survey.
“Strength and Stability”
“There is good news for everyone in this jobs report,” said Nick Bunker, economist for job search site Indeed: “workers will be happy that unemployment remains low (…). Employers will be pleased that labor market participation continues to grow.”
And according to him, even the officials of the American central bank (Fed), on the front line to fight once morest high inflation, will find their account there, “reassured by the gradual slowdown in the pace of hiring”.
However, he warns that “the turmoil in the financial market might cause turbulence”, in reference to the recent banking crisis, which has further tightened access to credit.
It is indeed up to the Fed to slow down economic activity, in the hope of putting an end to this rise in prices which has not been seen for 40 years.
To this end, it has been raising its rates for a year. This leads the banks to raise the cost of the loans they offer to households and companies, to weigh on consumption and investment, and put an end to the escalation in prices.
The Fed raised rates once more on Wednesday, following its monetary policy meeting, for the 10th time in a row.
“Too early to know”
And now, the question of a pause in these increases is on the table, to avoid weighing too much on economic activity, which might plunge the United States into recession. But the strength of the job market might argue in the opposite direction.
“It is far too early to know what monetary policy to adopt” at the next meeting in June, Chicago Fed President Austan Goolsbee, who has rotating voting rights this year, commented on Fox News. at the Fed.
“The labor market is by far the strongest part of the economy,” he stressed, but “the questions of what the credit conditions will be and what will be the fate of our regional banks (. ..) are going to matter a lot”.
At the end of March, there were still nearly 9.6 million job vacancies, according to the Labor Department’s JOLTS survey released Tuesday. It is, of course, in regular decline, but it remains at a very high level.
“The demand for labor still greatly exceeds the supply of available workers,” Fed Chairman Jerome Powell said at a press conference on Wednesday.
“We see some evidence of easing labor market conditions,” he said, “but overall you have a 50-year low unemployment rate.”
However, Nancy Vanden Houten, an economist for Oxford Economics, anticipates that “the cumulative rate hikes and the tightening of lending standards (will weigh) on the economy and the labor market in the second half of the year”.
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