WE’RE IN THE MONEY
SIXERS 223,000 new jobs • Unemployment drops to 3.8% • Hourly wages jump 2.7%
The US economy continued roaring back like a Mack Truck last month, with employers adding 223,000 jobs, helping lower the unemployment rate to an 18-year low of 3.8 percent.
Average hourly pay rose 2.7 percent from a year earlier, a slightly faster annual pace than in April, the Labor Department reported Friday. But pay growth remained below levels that are typical when the unemployment rate is this low.
Still, the report showed that the nearly 9-year-old economic expansion that followed the Great Recession — the secondlongest recovery on record — remained on track.
Employers even appeared to shrug off concerns about global trade disputes and the looming possibility of an all-out trade war fueled by President Trump’s imposition of tariffs on friends and foes alike.
Trump himself let loose a gleeful tweet about the report.
“Record JOBS DAY!! 223K jobs added. Unemployment is 3.8%, lowest in 50 yrs. Black and Asian unemployment hit historic new lows. Adult men and women, and teenagers, are at lowest since 2000. Hourly earnings are up! Tax CUTS aree working. America is WINNING BIG under President Trump!” he wrote. The unemployment rate was 3.9 percent in April. Analysts agreed the report was more good news for the economy and the White House. “The jobs report was strong. More than 200,000 net new jobs is a positive. Wage growth was respectable, too. We expect wages will grow more than 3 percent in the coming months,” Jack Ablin, chief investment officer for the Chicago-based wealth-management firm Cresset, told The Post. Chris Rupkey, chief financial economiste at Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group said: “May jobs report was good all oover and definitely something
for the president to crow about.”
Trump’s enthusiastic embrace of the Labor Department’s numbers was in stark contrast to his disparaging remarks about the agency on the campaign trail, when he called its unemployment numbers “one of the biggest hoaxes in modern politics.”
Trump had said the fix was in because the department wanted Americans to believe the economy was expanding under President Barack Obama.
About an hour before the data was released Friday, Trump hinted on Twitter that a strong jobs report was coming.
The president is normally briefed on the monthly jobs report the day before its release, and he and other administration officials generally don’t comment on it beforehand.
But Larry Kudlow, the president’s top economic adviser, defended Trump’s tweet in an interview on CNBC, saying it followed “law and custom.”
“I don’t think he gave anything away, incidentally,” said Kudlow (pictured left).
Friday’s report showed that hiring in the US is benefiting a wider range of Americans. The unemployment rate for highschool graduates was 3.9 percent, a 17-year low. For blacks, it hit a record low of 5.9 percent.
Investors applauded the report, with the Dow Jones industrial average rising 219 points.
The healthy jobs data makes it more likely that the Federal Re- serve will keep raising interest rates this year — at least twice more, and possibly three more times, after having increased its key rate in March.
With the jobless rate so low, employers have complained for months about the difficulty of finding workers to fill jobs.
Companies are also hiring the long-term unemployed — those who have been out of work for six months or longer, with their ranks falling by nearly one-third in the past year.
The job gains in May were broad-based.
Professional and business services, which include higherpaying fields such as accounting and engineering, added 31,000 jobs.
Health care, a consistent job engine for the entire recovery, gained nearly 32,000.
Manufacturing, which is benefiting from increased business investment in machinery and other equipment, added 18,000 jobs, and construction 25,000.
Consumers have started to spend more freely after having pulled back in the January-March quarter.
That gain could reflect, in part, the effect of the Trump administration’s tax cuts, which might be encouraging more Americans to step up spending.