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Jobs, jobs, jobs! The US report was weak:

• 75,000 jobs were created last month. Analysts had expected a gain of about 175,000 jobs, according to Bloomberg.
• The unemployment rate was 3.6 percent, the same as in April.
• Average hourly earnings rose by 0.2 percent, the same rate as in April. Over the last 12 months, earnings have risen by a solid 3.1 percent.

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However dramatic the fall off in hiring was in May, it’s part of a larger trend suggesting that the labor market has cooled from last year, when tax cuts provided a short-term lift. In the first five months of 2019, the economy added an average of 164,000 jobs, down from an average gain of 223,000 for all of 2018.

The retail sector, battered by the rise of e-commerce, lost jobs for the fourth month in a row. The sector has given up 50,000 jobs since January.

The share of Americans working or looking for a job was unchanged at 62.8 percent. Some economists had thought that number would rise as people were lured back into the labor market by signs of growth earlier this year.

Friday’s report also revised employment data for April and March downward by a total of 75,000 jobs.
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In the financial markets, investors saw the bright side of the disappointing report, with bond markets pricing in a growing likelihood that the Fed would act to cut interest rates. Yields on short- and long-term Treasury securities fell sharply after the report. The yield on the 10-year note dropped to 2.07 percent. Stocks rose, with the S&P 500 up 1.2 percent.

The Canadian report was better:

The Canadian dollar strengthened to a seven-week high against its U.S. counterpart on Friday, boosted by domestic data showing a record low unemployment rate that could give the Bank of Canada some confidence in its rosy outlook for the economy.

Canada added a higher-than-expected 27,700 net new jobs in May, which followed a record gain of 106,500 positions in April, and the unemployment rate dipped to a record low of 5.4 per cent, official data showed.
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The Bank of Canada has said that a slowdown in the domestic economy was temporary. But chances of an interest rate cut this year by the central bank stayed high, at about 85 per cent, after the Canadian jobs report, with data from the United States showing a sharp slowdown in U.S. job growth.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 7th, 2019 at 6:55 pm and is filed under Market Action. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.