New Jobs Report Today

The Scariest Jobs Chart Ever, showing that a pandemic killing millions does less damage to the economy than your average banker


And jobs have finally caught up to where they were 30 months ago

We have the monthly jobs report out, and the workforce grew by 528,000 and the unemployment rate fell by 0.1% to 3.5%, which by most definitions is a fairly robust employment state.

Specifically, job growth beat expectations by about 250,000, so the job growth was double most forecasts. 

The only question now is whetehr the Fed raises rates by 75 or 100 (0.75-1.00%) basis points at their next meeting.

U.S. employers added a robust 528,000 jobs last month, helping the economy recoup the 22 million positions lost early in the pandemic, as hirers clamored for workers despite a slowdown in economic growth.

The jobs recovery took nearly 2½ years and included a stretch in the first half of the year when payrolls grew faster than during any other post-World War II period that also featured the start of an economic contraction. The unemployment rate dropped to 3.5% last month, a half-century low also seen just before the pandemic in early 2020, the Labor Department said Friday.

………

The labor-force participation rate—or the share of adults working or seeking a job—ticked down to 62.1% in July from 62.2% a month earlier. While the economy has recovered all the jobs it lost since February 2020, there are still 623,000 fewer people in the workforce, a factor that has pushed up wages due to a demand for workers that is well above the number of available workers. 

One of the reasons that the labor force participation rate has not hit pre-pandemic levels is because somewhere north of 2% of the workforce is now suffering from long Covid and cannot return.

Also note, that normal employment growth in the before times was on the order of about 175,000 jobs a month, so we are still about 5¼ million behind where we would have been.