US Labor Market Slows Despite Job Adds in May

Asharq Al-Awsat

8 hours ago

The United States added 139,000 jobs in May, more than expected but pointing to a labor market that continues to slow.
The employment data released Friday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics exceeded forecasts for about 120,000 payroll gains but marked a decline from the revised 147,000 jobs added in April. The unemployment rate held steady at 4.2%, remaining near historic lows.
Stocks surged at Friday's open, with all three major indexes gaining about 1%.
In return, US government borrowing costs climbed as investors anticipated the Federal Reserve would keep interest rates higher for longer, making it less attractive to hold US debt.
The BLS report showed job losses in the federal government continued to pile up, with that sector shedding 22,000 roles in May alone.
The federal workforce is down by 59,000 since January, largely due to sweeping cuts by the Trump administration and multibillionaire tech executive Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency project.
Even as the economy continued to add jobs at a relatively steady clip last month, the report showed other signs of a weakening labor market.
The ratio of employed workers to the total population fell to 59.7%, its lowest since the pandemic.
An alternative measure of unemployment that includes 'discouraged' workers, or those who have stopped looking for work, returned to a post-pandemic high of 4.5%.
But President Donald Trump cheered the numbers, posting on his Truth Social platform Friday morning: 'AMERICA IS HOT! SIX MONTHS AGO IT WAS COLD AS ICE! BORDER IS CLOSED, PRICES ARE DOWN. WAGES ARE UP!'
Trump had urged Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell to slash interest rates by a full percentage point.
'Too Late' at the Fed is a disaster!' Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social.
In reality, employers added 212,000 jobs in November, unemployment was at 4.1%, the 12-month average of hourly pay gains have softened from nearly 4.2% then to 3.9% in May, and both the labor force participation rate and the employment-to-population ratio were slightly higher.
Only consumer prices have meaningfully cooled, ticking down from an annual inflation rate of 2.7% in November to 2.3% in April, the latest month with available data.
Analysts at Capital Economics called the May jobs report 'not as good as it looks.'
Still, they wrote in a note Friday, 'it shows that tariffs are having little negative impact' and added that the Federal Reserve is likely to continue holding interest rates steady 'while it assesses the effects of policy changes on the economy.'