Employers Added Fewer Jobs Than Expected In January
Key Points
- U.S. employers added 143,000 jobs in January, the slowest job growth since October, while the unemployment rate fell to 4% from 4.1% in December.
- The slowdown in this work is unlikely to affect the thinking of Fed officials who have no pressure to boost the economy by cutting borrowing costs.
- The job market has settled into relatively slow recruitment and low unemployment rates.
Employers have added the fewest people to their salaries since October, while unemployment has unexpectedly dropped, and the job market has further settled in the low-hiring mining grooves in January.
U.S. employers added 143,000 jobs in January, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said Friday. According to the survey of economists on economists Dow Jones News and Wall Street Journal. Meanwhile, the unemployment rate fell to 4% from 4.1% in December, the lowest since May. Median prediction requires that this rate remain stable.
Data shows the latest trends in the job market are intensifying. For months, employers have Avoid recruitment and layoffsjob growth has slowed significantly since the massive explosion in demand for workers with soaring hiring and wages in 2022. Despite the slow hiring rate, the job market remains resilient, with unemployment hovering at low levels by historical standards.
“January’s job gains were a bit softer in January, but a big view in the U.S. labor market shows it’s still on a very solid foundation,” Ali Jaffery, an economist at CIBC Capital Markets, wrote in a comment.
Job growth may have slowed down due to one-time factors Wildfires in Californiaand unusually cold weather, Lindsay Rosner, head of fixed income investment at Goldman Sachs Asset Management, wrote in a comment.
Rosner wrote that the slowdown may not be enough to allow Fed officials to lower interest rates in the near future. The Fed has Keep the price exceptionally highpush up the borrowing costs of various loans to slow down inflation Still very painful Used for family budgets.
Financial markets expect the Fed to lower interest rates sometime this year if inflation returns to the Fed at an annual rate of 2% or signs of trouble. Congressional mission Fed Keep inflation low and employment high.
Correcting records
Friday’s report also included several revisions, one affecting the data for the month and the other affecting historical records. The Bureau finalized revisions to the work data between March 2023 and March 2024 and reduced the number of work increased by 589,000. This is smaller than the preliminary version of the revised version released last year. Pruning work grew by 818,000 During that period.
The second revision changed the size of the population and the labor force, adding 2.9 million people, of which 2.1 million were part of the labor force in January, and they were not judged before. The change is due to the new data from the census that changed the estimates of the number of immigrants recently arrived in the country. The bureau said the result was 0.1 percentage point higher in unemployment and labor force participation.