April Jobs Report

Written by Ryan Bouchey:

The April jobs report came in well off its expected 200,000 number as the U.S. economy only created 160,000 last month. Is this an indication that the economy is doing worse than expected? Or is it a blip in the radar? Well there’s a few different ways to look at it.

Obviously falling 40,000 jobs short of expectations can cause some concern. The average job growth in 2015 was 229,000 per month, so we’re even further off that rate as well. It’s important to keep in mind that one month worth of data doesn’t tell the full story. In fact we saw two months in a row last year of sub 150,000 jobs created in August and September, only to have October and November create 295,000 and 280,000 respectively. You must also take into account that having an unemployment rate of 5% is in some cases considered “full employment.” With that in mind, it will be nearly impossible to continue with the high level of job creation we saw last year.

Could this drop be a sign the economy is stalling? It could be, but we aren’t seeing an overall trend in the U.S. economy yet to indicate that we’re reaching capacity. We continue on our slow and steady pace of growth, while it’s not exciting, it also doesn’t mean were headed for doom. As we reach the full employment rate, we’ve begun to see wages increase. This is a positive sign to the economy and a trend that hopefully continues. We’ll continue to monitor the overall economy and jobs outlook and begin to be more concerned if we were to see a trend of decline, rather than one bad month for jobs.