Latest jobs report is just good enough to give investors a wake-up call
By
Tiana Lowe Doescher
February 8, 2024 9:26 pm
On its face, the most recent jobs report blew away economists’ expectations. According to the January employment report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the U.S. economy added a gargantuan 353,000 jobs that month. That’s nearly double what economists expected and enough to keep the unemployment rate steady at 3.7%, just a hair above the half-century low of exactly one year prior. Despite the fastest monetary tightening in four decades by the Federal Reserve, the labor market remains tighter than a drum, with even December’s jobs gains revised upwards to 333,000.
Look under the hood, however, and the picture is less pristine.
There are some minor technicalities that make the headline figures a little more rosy than reality. Not only does the BLS itself caution us that it has slightly altered its method of calculations, leading to numbers that may be above what they would be otherwise, but it also had to revise every other month of 2023 other than December downwards. In total, the economy created 1.3 million fewer jobs than initially reported by the BLS across each month of last year.
But the real, persistent kicker is that the number of jobs created does not directly translate to the number of people newly employed, as the economy has replaced 1.6 million full-time jobs lost with 1.6 million part-time jobs gained over the last half year. And while this is a less-than-positive development for the economy in general and those workers scrambling to make rent with two or three side gigs in particular, that the Fed still hasn’t achieved its goals of plucking people out of the labor force back into it has actually forced investors to wake up to the reality that the Fed will indeed retain higher interest rates for longer.
more
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/magazine-business/2842392/january-jobs-report-investors-wake-up-call/
