May 4, 2024
WASHINGTON (AP) — The nation’s employers scaled back their hiring in October, adding 150,000 jobs. Last month’s job growth is down sharply from a robust 297,000 gain in September.
The United Auto Workers’ strikes against Detroit’s automakers likely shrank October’s job gain by at least 30,000, economists say. The strikes ended this week with tentative settlements in which the companies granted significantly better pay and benefits to the union’s workers.
The unemployment rate rose from 3.8% to 3.9% in October.
Friday’s jobs report from the government comes as the Fed is assessing incoming economic data to determine whether to leave its key interest rate unchanged, as it did this week, or to raise it again in its drive to curb inflation. In September, consumer prices rose 3.7% from a year earlier, down drastically from a year-over-year peak of 9.1% in June 2022 but still well above the Fed’s 2% target level.
The Fed scrutinizes the monthly job data to assess whether employers are still hiring and raising pay aggressively as a result of labor shortages. When that happens, companies typically try to pass on their higher labor costs to their customers in the form of higher prices, thereby raising inflationary pressures.
The Fed’s policymakers are trying to calibrate their key interest rate to simultaneously cool inflation, support job growth and ward off a recession. Inflationary pressures have been easing as the Fed has sharply raised borrowing costs. U.S. consumer prices rose 3.7% in September from a year earlier, down drastically from a year-over-year peak of 9.1% in June 2022.
Wage gains, which can fuel inflation, have been slowing, too. Yet inflation remains well above the Fed’s 2% target, and workers’ year-over-year pay gains would need to fall further to be consistent with the central bank’s inflation goal.
In the meantime, despite long-standing predictions by economists that the Fed’s ever-higher interest rates would trigger a recession, the U.S. economy, the world’s largest, remains durable. From July through September, the nation’s gross domestic product — the output of all goods and services — rose at a 4.9% annual pace, the fastest quarterly growth in more than two years.
On Wednesday, the Labor Department reported that employers posted 9.6 million job openings in September, up slightly from August. Opening are down substantially from the record 12 million recorded in March 2022 but are still high by historical standards: Before 2021 and the economy’s powerful recovery from the COVID-19 recession, monthly job openings had never topped 8 million. There are now 1.4 jobs available, on average, for every unemployed American.
The Fed’s decision this week to leave its benchmark rate unchanged for a second straight time will give its policymakers time to assess the cumulative effects of their previous rate hikes. Many economists say they believe the Fed is done raising rates for now.
Still, at a news conference Wednesday, Fed Chair Jerome Powell cautioned that any evidence that the economy is running too hot “or that tightness in the labor market is no longer easing” could hinder further progress on inflation and justify additional rate hikes.
