BREAKING NEWS Wall Street flies as shock jobs report defies expectations
The Labor Department's June employment report, released Thursday morning, shows 147,000 new non-farm jobs added last month, a sign that employers are holding steady amid rising concerns.
Economists expected 117,500 payroll gains. Today's increase is up from 139,000 jobs added last month, according to FactSet.
The unemployment rate also 4.1, up slightly from 4.0 percent in May. The Fed called the unemployment rate 'little changed.'
Wall Street immediately reacted to the jobs report with an inflow of cash. All three major indexes were trading in the red before the jobs release at 8:30am.
Analysts have been worried that the slow tick upward is getting close to a psychological threshold: the number hasn't read above 4.3 percent since October 2021.
The surprisingly hot jobs numbers come amid host of pressures facing the economy: higher interest rates, slowing consumer demand, and ongoing policy uncertainty under President Donald Trump — including a federal hiring freeze, immigration clampdowns, and trade tensions that have left some industries skittish about US investment.
The US jobs market has been on a roll for years now.
Hiring was turbocharged during a post-COVID rebound. At the time, employers were adding 400,000 jobs a month and still struggled to fill every role.
That fever broke in 2024, when monthly job growth averaged just 168,000.
Before the latest monthly numbers, America was adding an average of 124,000 jobs each month.
The slowdown has been gradual — and not catastrophic.
While the Fed's 11 rate hikes in 2022 and 2023 cooled the labor market, they didn't trigger the recession many feared, while also cooling inflation to just above target 2 percent rates.
The combination of skipping a recession and cooling inflation was commonly referred to as a soft landing.
But warning lights are blinking.
Private companies shed 33,000 jobs in June, according to a separate ADP report released Wednesday.
That drop, driven by a reluctance to backfill roles and a wait-and-see attitude on new hiring, may signal more softness ahead — though ADP's data often diverges from the government's numbers.
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Reuters
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