225 jobs add. People who haven't worked in years returning to work. 4.9% unemployment which is very good for the US. Wages are rising.
Why should you care? It's a big boost for Hillary, it could get her elected.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworst.../#424cbf0e782f
We’ve just got the July employment numbers for the US and they look like there’s strong job growth going on. 255,000 new jobs this month along with an upward revision of the previous month’s numbers. It looks like the US economy is growing well – and what is most important is that those discouraged workers seem to be coming back into the economy and also that they’re able to find jobs. Thus we might say that Janet Yellen’s little gamble on keeping interest rates low for the moment is working and eradicating that rump of long term unemployment that is blighting the US economy as a whole.
The numbers:
The American economy roared ahead last month, as employers added 255,000 jobs, a bigger-than-expected gain that suggests the country’s growth rate may be more robust than thought just two months ago.
Despite the rise in jobs the unemployment number was flat at 4.9%. That would indicate that some more of those dissuaded workers coming in out of their hidden unemployment.
Payrolls climbed by 255,000 last month, exceeding all forecasts in a Bloomberg survey of 89 economists, following a 292,000 gain in June that was a bit larger than previously estimated, a Labor Department report showed Friday. The jobless rate held at 4.9 percent as many of the people streaming into the labor force found jobs.
The importance of this is that we know we’ve got two different sets of unemployed people out there. There’s the short term unemployed and as far as they go we think we’re pretty much at full employment. There always will be some number of people because it takes time to get hired, or to choose between possibilities, between jobs. Thus, given that about 20% of all people move jobs each year, it takes a month or three to make the move, there will always be some percentage of “frictional unemployment”. The other group are those who have been out of work for too long to be getting unemployment insurance and so might not even be registered as unemployed. We want to get these people back into the labour force. And what seems to be happening is that they are coming. Thus we can have jobs growth and no change in the unemployment rate.
Yellen’s gamble has been that this might happen so why not keep interest rates lower for longer. It would appear to be working too.