Does April Jobs Report Mean Inflation's Cooling, Or That Joe Biden's Doomed?

175,000 new jobs is good, unemployment still under four percent.

Professor Prettypaws is back with the jobs report. Maybe he’s looking at a monitor, or maybe a bug on the wall.

The US economy added 175,000 new jobs in April, according to the monthly jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which also reported the unemployment rate edged up a teensy bit to 3.9 percent, with unemployment for men overall up a bit but Black unemployment down. Most other demographics stayed about the same as in the March report.

Naturally, this is either terrific news that inflation is easing, or a very troublesome sign that the recovery is stalling out, and maybe both if you’re a reporter on the economy beat. For its part, CNBC took the latter approach, noting that today’s report came in “much below” the 240,000 jobs expected by Dow Jones economists, but adding that the numbers have futures traders more optimistic about the chances of the Federal Reserve cutting interest rates.

Another potential sign of inflation maybe easing was that average hourly wages “rose 0.2 percent from the previous month and 3.9 percent from a year ago, both below consensus estimates,” so there’s that.

Wall Street, just looking for an excuse to get excited about something, opened higher on the news, and even CNBC’s obligatory economist interview was more glad than dour:

The report raised the prospect of a “Goldilocks” climate where growth continues but not at such a rapid pace to force the Fed to tighten policy further.

“With this report, the porridge was just about right,” said Dan North, senior economist at Allianz Trade. “What would you like at this point the cycle? We’ve had interest rates jacked up pretty high, so you would expect to see the labor market slow down a little. But we’re still at pretty high levels.”

By golly, there wasn’t even a “however” in there!

Employment grew in health care (56,000 jobs), which thank Crom after so many people burned out during the pandemic, and in the related category of “social assistance” (31,000), which is like home health workers, not people in Social Security offices. Other sectors with strong growth were transportation/warehousing (22,000), retail (20,000) and construction (9,000), all of which means things are getting built and made and sold, in case you were planning a WPA mural.

Donald Trump complained on his fake Twitter, “HORRIBLE JOB NUMBERS,” a strong argument for making his trial continue five days a week, and the New York Times, just to remind us that we are in fact better off than we were four years ago, pointed out that before the pandemic and economic crash, the economy under Trump only averaged about 180,000 new jobs every month, “just a tad higher than April’s gain.” Biden’s Council of Economic Advisors noted that over the past three months, even with the decline in new jobs for April, job growth has been up by 242,000 monthly. Unemployment has been below four percent for 27 months now, another new record.

Although the Fed decided Wednesday to keep interest rates at current levels, continued cool job growth may signal that it’s time for a small cut during the summer, we will just have to see.

In conclusion, have yourselves a happy but not irrationally exuberant weekend, kids.

[Bureau of Labor Statistics / CNBC / NYT]

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