The jobless rate fell to 5% – the lowest level in seven-and-a-half years.
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Among the major worker groups, the unemployment rates for adult men (4.7 percent), adult women (4.5 percent), teenagers (15.9 percent), whites (4.4 percent), blacks (9.2 percent), Asians (3.5 percent), and Hispanics (6.3 percent) showed little or no change in October.
But that didn’t happen in the ’90s and it hasn’t happened recently, either. Fed fund futures, which are securities that bet on which way the Fed will move interest rates, now show a 74 percent chance of the central bank raising rates in December, up from 60 percent on Wednesday. That is 2.5 percent higher than 12 months ago, the sharpest year-over-year gain since July 2009. This promising jobs number comes on the heels of much slower growth this year than last (an average of only 199,000 a month in the first three quarters).
Annual income is rising slowly overall, but in many fields, it’s stagnant or even slowly dropping.
This video includes images from Getty Images.
US stocks closed mildly lower after wavering between small gains and losses Thursday, as investors digested mixed economic data ahead of the jobs report.
Paul Ashworth, at Capital Economics, said the strong figures “confirms that the weakness in August and September was just a temporary blip and, given the circumstances, a December interest rate hike would now appear to be the most likely outcome”.
USA financial market indexes edged higher Friday after an October jobs report that significantly beat economists’ expectations. Inflation has been running below the Fed’s goal of 2 percent, which is generally considered consistent with a healthy economy.
Export-intensive manufacturers that make goods such as heavy machinery and companies that extract fossil fuels have been battered by a strong dollar and plunging oil prices.
Still, the October numbers represented an improvement over the previous two months. “With numbers like these, the Fed are nearly duty bound to raise rates within this year”, Mitsubishi precious metals analyst Jonathan Butler said.
Payrolls declined another 5,000 in the mining sector, bringing to 109,000 the jobs lost since the last employment peak in December 2014. Meanwhile, year-over-year wage growth hit its highest mark since mid-2009.
At present, the unemployment rate has dipped 5.0%, which is better than the Federal Reserve’s minimum threshold, and below 58.3% historical average. Consensus among economists was for about 180,000 new jobs to be added.
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Employment in October was led by the biggest gain in retail payrolls since November, the strongest hiring in construction in eight months and a pickup at temporary-help agencies. But the labor force participation rate, or the share of working-age Americans who are employed or at least looking for a job, held at a near 38-year low of 62.4 percent.
