House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Kevin Brady (R-Texas) said that while the report that Americans are finding jobs is welcome news, “we can do much more to kick this economy into high gear”.
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But acting after the economy added, say, just 110,000 jobs in November likely would not have been as favorable for business confidence or stocks.
Now, many experts agree that only something economically disastrous could alter the Fed’s course to raise rates this year.
She told a Congressional hearing in Washington that economic conditions appeared to be improving enough for policy makers to raise interest rates at the next meeting.
November’s jobs report comes ahead of the Federal Reserve’s December meeting, during which it could decide on whether to raise short-term interest rates for the first time since 2006. MIXED MESSAGES Wall Street’s top banks said in a Reuters poll on Friday that they expect the central bank to maintain a slow pace of rate hikes, with the median forecast for the fed funds rate for mid-2016 about 0.75 percent and 1.125 percent for the end of the year.
A broad measure of joblessness that includes people who want to work but have given up searching and those working part-time because they can not find full-time employment rose one-tenth of a percentage point to 9.9 percent.
Construction firms added 46,000 jobs, the most in two years. She saw more opportunities than she did during a previous job search two years earlier and even felt confident enough to turn down offers. The unemployment rate stayed steady at 5%, its lowest level since 2008. Still, the share of Americans looking for work remains near a 40-year low. And she has cited the labor market’s cumulative progress in recent years, with the unemployment rate down to 5% from 10% in 2009, and employers adding an average of more than 200,000 jobs a month in 2015.
Average hourly wages, up 2.3 percent year-on-year in Friday’s Labor Department report, supported Yellen’s argument that wage gains were accelerating after a long period of stagnation. “We can anticipate further improvement… next year”, said Scott Anderson, chief economist at Bank of the West in San Francisco. The robust hiring indicates that consumer spending is powering the economy even as weak growth overseas and low oil prices squeeze US manufacturers and drillers.
Many observers have been hoping to see stronger figures in terms of average hourly earnings.
The latest non-farm payroll data on Friday removed the last big obstacle that might have given the Fed pause for thought.
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With the November report, the United States has added and average 237,000 new jobs each month in the past year, and the number of officially unemployed people has fallen by 1.1 million. Within this industry, accounting and bookkeeping services added 11,000 jobs, and employment continued to trend up in computer systems design and related services (+5,000).
