In November, the non-farm payroll increased by only 210,000, less half than what was forecast.
Unemployment fell to 4.2%, but I am inclined to think that this is an artifact of the fact that more people no longer searching for jobs, which means that they are no longer counted:
Hiring slowed last month amid Covid-19 uncertainties, but people returned to the labor force in droves in a sign the tight labor market could be loosening.
The U.S. economy added a seasonally adjusted 210,000 jobs in November—the smallest gain since last December and a marked slowdown from an upwardly revised increase of 546,000 in October, the Labor Department said Friday. Almost 600,000 people joined the workforce, and the unemployment rate fell to 4.2% from 4.6%.
The payrolls number, which comes from a Labor Department survey of businesses, offered an unusually large divergence from data from a separate survey of households also released Friday that showed strong progress in employment.
That survey showed that 1.1 million more people were employed in November than in October. The labor-force participation rate rose to 61.8%, the highest level since March 2020 at the start of the pandemic.
I rather expect the number to go up when the data is updated in about a month, but not up to the 573,000 forecast earlier.
Also, there appears to be some real problem with the statistics, as evidenced by the divergence between business and household surveys.
What can I say but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯?
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