The economy added only 38,000 jobs in May and the workforce shed almost half a million people.
To summarize the sentiments of most analysts, not great.
The Wall Street Journal has more:
“Not even a magician can take this number and make it sound good,” said Quincy Krosby, market strategist at Prudential Financial. The unemployment rate, which is obtained from a separate survey of U.S. households, fell to 4.7% in May from 5.0% in April as fewer people looked for work. Economists surveyed by the Journal had predicted payrolls would rise by 158,000 and the unemployment rate would hold steady. The decline in the unemployment rate was driven by 458,000 people leaving the workforce. The labor-force participation rate fell to 62.6% in May, down 0.2 percentage point from April. “This was an unqualified dud of a jobs report,” said Curt Long, chief economist at the National Association of Federal Credit Unions …
This is not to say that American jobs are vanishing like Marty McFly and company in that photo from Back to the Future. But maybe it was poor timing this week to say those in “cars and bars and VFW halls all across America” listening to talk radio and cable news have a distorted view of the economy.
