August saw a modest increase in U.S. job growth over July, but the numbers still missed economists’ expectations according to the latest jobs report. The Labor Department's report on Friday showed that just 142,000 jobs were added, falling short of the 161,000 that economists had forecast, signaling weaker-than-hoped progress.
The unemployment rate dipped just slightly to 4.2%, which was in line with predictions. It hit 4.3% in July — the highest level since October 2021. Despite hopes for a stronger rebound, these numbers point to a sluggish recovery.
Perhaps even more troubling data from the report are the downward revisions for the June and July employment figures. In June, employers added just 118,000 jobs, down from the initially reported 179,000. Meanwhile, July's already weak growth of 114,000 was lowered further to just 89,000.
The original July jobs report prompted a major market selloff as well as fears of a recession. So this new jobs report is even worse. Not only are we not meeting expectations, but the Biden-Harris administration is still gaslighting us, putting out inflated numbers and revising them downward later.
Imagine if the July jobs report initially reported that just 89,000 had been created. Exactly.
A lot was riding on this jobs report, The Washington Post notes.
Analysts were watching to see if the unemployment rate spike in July was a mere data quirk or indicative of a broader slowdown in the labor market. Federal Reserve officials will be using the data to steer interest rate cuts later this month. And the presidential candidates will be looking to the report to make their case for who is better for the economy.
“This is the biggest jobs report in a number of years in terms of its importance for the Fed and how much it corroborates [the weakness] we’ve seen in other more closely watched labor market data,” said Sarah House, an economist at Wells Fargo.
The report continues:
The labor market has been steadily cooling over the past year, weighed down by elevated interest rates designed to temper inflation. But a spike in the unemployment rate to 4.3 percent in July, the highest level since 2021, taken with other weak jobs data, sparked widespread recession fears and a major Wall Street sell-off last month.
Indeed, the flurry of sluggish jobs data — including recent downward revisions to jobs data — has prompted concerns that the Federal Reserve waited too long to lower rates causing cracks in the labor market that could snowball into widespread joblessness.
The August jobs report comes weeks after the Bureau of Labor Statistics came clean and revised down its wildly inflated job numbers for March 2023 through March 2024. The report revealed that the Biden-Harris administration brazenly overstated job creation by a staggering 818,000.
"It is a huge revision down, 818,000 fewer jobs," Edward Lawrence of Fox Business reported at the time. "This is the — basically, the government's overstated the amount of people in the workforce. And even when you look under this, manufacturing was down... 115,000 people. So this is a revision down, a significant revision down, the largest in 15 years that we've seen."
"And it basically says that the government has now overstated the amount of people who are working in this workforce," he continued. "It shows weakness in the job markets over the past year that we didn't realize was there, but now we know is there. So again, 818,000 overall jobs down, manufacturing down 115,000… And if you could just put construction down 45,000, so these numbers are huge numbers in revisions down."
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