A decent-but-not-great jobs report to round out a still-strong 2023

It was another Jobs Friday in America this week, and at top glance, it seems like things continued to roll along in this country's job market as 2023 ended.

BREAKING:

IT'S ANOTHER BEAT. 216K JOBS. UNEMPLOYMENT RATE HOLDS AT 3.7%

Economists had expected 175K jobs and a 3.8% unemployment rate.https://t.co/bC4r56wRje

— Joe Weisenthal (@TheStalwart) January 5, 2024

Average hourly earnings grow 0.4% vs. 0.3% expectations.

LFPR falls from 62.8% to 62.5%

— Joe Weisenthal (@TheStalwart) January 5, 2024

Sounds pretty good, unless you were hoping for rate cuts in the next month. And it wraps up a still-strong 2023 in the US jobs market, where we gained more jobs than in any year of the Trump Administration.

The US economy added 2.7 million jobs added in 2023.

A great year for (most) job seekers.

2023: 2.7 million jobs added
2022: 4.8 million
2021: 7.3 million
2020: -9.3 million
2019: 2 million
2018: 2.3 million
2017: 2.1 million
2016: 2.3 million
2015: 2.7 million
2014: 3 million

— Heather Long (@byHeatherLong) January 5, 2024

But you can also see things are slowing down when it comes to job growth. Now we should expect that in a year where unemployment was below 4% in every month (there are only so many people available to take jobs at that point), but even the last six months had a notable slowdown.

There are also some signs of weakness as you dig into the December jobs report that should calm any concerns about inflation. Starting with sizable downward revisions for the previous two months.

The change in total nonfarm payroll employment for October was revised down by 45,000, from +150,000 to +105,000, and the change for November was revised down by 26,000, from +199,000 to +173,000. With these revisions, employment in October and November combined is 71,000 lower than previously reported. (Monthly revisions result from additional reports received from businesses and government agencies since the last published estimates and from the recalculation of seasonal factors.)

So the December increase was only 145,000 compared to what was previously reported. Wonder what the "experts" would have said if that was the December gain in this report? Also, while the unemployment rate stayed the same, the percentage of working-age adults working went down.

The labor force participation rate, at 62.5 percent, and the employment-population ratio, at 60.1 percent, both decreased by 0.3 percentage point in December.

Let's see if that's a one-month blip, or if it's a sign that things are slowing down even more, and/or a wave of retirements are hitting with the recent stock market rally and start of a new year.

That said, 3.7% unemployment and 6-figure job growth each month is a nice place to start 2024 from, and if we keep this going for the next year with inflation staying at or below a sub-4% unemployment rate, a lot of people will be feeling even better about this economy as they hit the polls in November.