If you were expecting something dramatic — something exciting — from Friday’s US jobs report, you’re out of luck.
Overall hiring was solid at 177,000, according to the NFP headline, the unemployment rate was unchanged and average hourly earnings growth was a touch cool.
In other words: Good news, and who wants that? Bad news and acrimony are the oxygen for the fire that burns deep in the American consciousness. Reports like this one make the second civil war we’ve spent the last decade planning for less likely. (What am I gonna do with all these bullets and canned goods?! I couldn’t drink this much bottled water in two lifetimes!)
Consensus was looking for 140,000 (give or take) from the NFP readout, so the actual print was a meaningful beat, if not quite a barnburner.
Revisions lopped 58,000 combined from February and March’s hiring. The three-month moving average is now 155,000.
Gains in April were led by healthcare and transportation services, which added 51,000 and 29,000 jobs, respectively. Financial activities chipped in 14,000 and social assistance 8,000. The federal government category shed another 9,000 positions, taking the YTD shrinkage to 26,000. The BLS noted that “employees on paid leave or receiving ongoing severance pay are counted as employed in the establishment survey,” a polite way of saying federal payrolls are actually down more.
Most other categories showed little to no change in hiring over the month, which isn’t optimal. If there was a criticism to be leveled against this release, it’s probably that hiring appeared to be pretty narrow.
As noted above, the jobless rate was steady at 4.2%, up eight tenths from the low notched two years ago, but still close enough to “full employment” to keep the Fed happy. The participation rate ticked up a second month to 62.6%, erasing the two-tenths decline from January to February.
At just 0.2%, the MoM AHE print was pleasantly cool, although the “pleasantly” part ignores that workers need to see warmer pay gains if tariffs do in fact lead to a lasting increase in prices. Pay growth was 3.8% YoY (versus 3.9% seen), an annual rate more or less consistent with 2% consumer price growth on most models I’ve seen.
Let’s see, what else? Manufacturing payrolls shrank 1,000, a far better result than the 5,000 decline economists saw, and private hiring was 167,000 versus 125,000 expected. The household survey showed a 436,000 gain.
I’m not going to lie to you or waste your time, especially not on a Friday. This was a good report. If you want someone to comb through the release and find a bear narrative or recession confirmation bias, God knows there are multitudes of would-be macro mavens excited to do so, but stocks should rally on this release if they can get over the bad vibes from Apple and Amazon.
Oh, and I’d be remiss not to note that Donald Trump will almost surely take credit for a good jobs report even as he claims every less-good data point, including and especially this week’s GDP release, was someone else’s fault.
I might have to go looking for one of these great new jobs. My services related self-employment, depending on people making large purchases, has almost completely dried up in the last month. It’s not just me either, all my friends doing the same job are reporting the same slowdown.
which sector is this, may i ask? i dont want ASL but just curious purely from an economic perspective.
Marine Surveyor, like a home inspector and appraiser in one, but for yachts before people buy them. Not Bezo’s type yachts, usually 30-70 feet, $50k-$3mill.
“Oh, and I’d be remiss not to note that Donald Trump will almost surely take credit for a good jobs report even as he claims every less-good data point, including and especially this week’s GDP release, was someone else’s fault.”
This was my first thought on seeing the headlines this morning. Funny how that works, isn’t it? But goes to show how great his genius is…..despite Biden screwing up the April 2025 economic reports, Trump still managed to make hiring great again! Ooops, I forgot to capitalize the Important Words.
Decent but backwards-looking. NFP is always backwards-looking and, being from the same month as Liberation Day, April NFP is especially so. Do we think, for example, that April’s gains in transportation services means that sector is doing fine now and in coming months?
That transportation number stood out to me too. I have a friend who drives a big-rig for UPS and they just announced they are closing about 70 of their smaller facilities/hubs.
I think UPS announced it will cut 20,000 jobs this year.
Looking into the timing of data for NFP: “In the establishment survey, the reference period is the pay period that includes the 12th of the month.”
Assuming most pay periods are biweekly, the April NFP quite literally is counting jobs extant at the start of the month . . . before “Liberation Day”.
This is being technically ticky tacky – whether the NFP report counted jobs at the start, middle, or end of April probably doesn’t matter much. It is simply too soon to see the labor market effects.