US, employment data disappoint – BBC

The disappointing US employment report halved the odds a rise in interest rates by the Federal Reserve in the next meeting in June. According to the “future federal funds”, used by investors to make bets on the moves of the US central bank, the chances of a close in two months fell to 6% from 13% on Thursday. For December increased to 48% from 57%. But what are the employment data that have changed the odds of an increase in rates by Janet Yellen?

The data for April

The number of jobs created in April in the US is lower than the average of 2015, when new employees were 228,000 per month and also the lowest average of 260,000 per month in 2014. in the first four months of 2016 have created an average of 192,000 seats per month . The unemployment rate, in fact stuck at 5%, and ‘dropped by 2.2% from August 2013, when it stood at 7.2%, and is therefore within the average between 4 and 5% of first the recession. The Federal Reserve considers tolerable as a long-term value of not more than 5.5%. Fueling the uncertainty is the fact that the numbers of previous months have been revised downwards: in February and March have created a total of 19,000 jobs in less than initially estimated. Rising wages, which rose by 8 cents to $ 25.53 per hour. On an annual basis they were up 2.5%, above the range between 1.9 and 2.2% recorded from 2012 onwards and over the average of 2% in the last six years. The duration of the average work week has increased by 0.1 to 34.5 hours hours. In addition, the labor force participation, rising in the previous four months, she came back down, going from 63 to 62.8%, approaching to a minimum from October 1977 (equal to 62.4%, reached record low equaled last September ) and remaining well below the 66% of before the recession.

The sectors

Looking at individual sectors, be noted that in that of professional and business services added 65,000 seats were, while in that of social health ‘and support new employees were 38,200. The manufacturing has only added 4,000 positions, while in retail the seats were 3,100 less. In April, there were about 7.9 million people who actively looked for a job but could not find it, because basically unchanged from the previous month and lower than the 8.5 million in March 2015. Including the Americans who are content to work part -time and discouraged, the unemployment rate and ‘stood at 9.7%, slightly down from 9.8% the previous month. The long-term unemployed (those jobless for at least 27 weeks) decreased by 150,000 units’ to 2.1 million and accounted for 25.7% of the total.