![]() The Black unemployment rate tumbled to a record low in April for the second month in a row, providing fresh evidence of America’s historic jobs boom. “That being said, we won’t know whether we’ve achieved a soft landing probably until the end of this year.” “This is what a soft landing would look like, with job growth gradually slowing to a more sustainable pace,” Faucher added. ![]() The ongoing resilience of the labor market also helps to bolster hopes that it’s still possible for the Fed to bring down inflation without jettisoning millions of people to the unemployment rolls and triggering a recession. For businesses, it looks like they’re finding that perhaps it’s a little bit easier to find workers now.” “Businesses are still trying to hire, demand for labor is still strong, but it’s not quite as strong as it was even in late 2022. “We are seeing a slowing in the labor market, and that’s good news from an inflation perspective,” Gus Faucher, chief economist with the PNC Financial Services Group, told CNN. While that’s above the average 183,000 monthly gain seen in the decade before the pandemic, it’s a far cry below what was seen during the economic rebound of the past two years (when monthly job gains averaged 399,000 in 2022 and 606,000 in 2021). Those revisions bring average job growth down to 222,000 for the past three months. Last month’s job growth may have been stronger than economists expected, but the latest BLS report also noted that the previously reported estimates for February and March were revised downward by a combined 149,000 jobs. “You want a job, it’s yours for the asking,” Chris Rupkey, chief economist at FwdBonds, wrote in a note. ![]() “It’s a little like how sports commentators used to describe defending basketball great Michael Jordan: One can’t stop him, one can only hope to contain him.”Īnd for job seekers and workers, that’s a great thing: “The American labor market right now is simply unstoppable,” RSM economist Joseph Brusuelas wrote in a note Friday. The blunt-force effect of rate hikes - that make borrowing money more costly and in turn reduce demand and prices - was expected to send a chill through the nation’s red-hot labor market, which at the time had a historically low 3.6% unemployment rate.įourteen months and 5 percentage points later, the economy added more than a quarter of a million jobs and the unemployment rate dipped down again to a decades-low 3.4%. When the Federal Reserve started its inflation-busting campaign back in March 2022, concerns grew about the potential collateral damage: How many Americans could lose their jobs as a result? Here are some takeaways from the report and what it could mean for workers, job seekers, employers, the Federal Reserve and everyone in between: That’s a good chunk more than economists were expecting, making this jobs report the 12th out of the last 13 to come in “hot.” High prices, rising interest rates and banking uncertainty be damned: The US labor market is still chugging right along.Įmployers added 253,000 jobs in April, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday.
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