US Adds 151K Jobs in August Disappointing Markets

Companies kept adding to payrolls in August while measures of slack in the labor market were little changed, signaling steady hiring in the face of lackluster global growth.
Payrolls climbed by 151,000 last month following a 275,000 gain in July that was larger than previously estimated, a Labor Department report showed Friday in Washington. The median forecast in a Bloomberg survey called for 180,000. The jobless rate and labor participation rate held steady, while wage gains moderated.



The August figure is consistent with a simmering-down of payrolls growth so far this year as the economy slogs through a period of weak investment and some companies have difficulty finding workers. Federal Reserve officials will have to weigh the jobs data as they decide whether to raise the benchmark interest rate for the first time in 2016.

“This expansion is getting long in the tooth, so it shouldn’t be too surprising that trend job growth would begin to moderate,” Ryan Sweet, a senior economist at Moody’s Analytics Inc. in West Chester, Pennsylvania, said before the report.

The 89 estimates in the Bloomberg survey ranged from gains of 92,000 to 255,000 after a previously reported 255,000 July increase. Revisions subtracted a net 1,000 jobs from overall payrolls in the previous two months, as June’s increase was cut to 271,000 from 292,000.

via Bloomberg

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Alfonso Esparza

Alfonso Esparza

Senior Currency Analyst at Market Pulse
Alfonso Esparza specializes in macro forex strategies for North American and major currency pairs. Upon joining OANDA in 2007, Alfonso Esparza established the MarketPulseFX blog and he has since written extensively about central banks and global economic and political trends. Alfonso has also worked as a professional currency trader focused on North America and emerging markets. He has been published by The MarketWatch, Reuters, the Wall Street Journal and The Globe and Mail, and he also appears regularly as a guest commentator on networks including Bloomberg and BNN. He holds a finance degree from the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education (ITESM) and an MBA with a specialization on financial engineering and marketing from the University of Toronto.
Alfonso Esparza