Last jobs report of the Biden Era completes a great record

We got the last jobs Friday for Joe Biden's term in office. And it added to what was already an already-impressive record.

JUST IN: A strong December jobs report. The US economy added 256,000 jobs (well above expectations). Overall, the US added 2.2 million jobs in 2024. That’s about the same as 2018. Unemployment rate fell slightly to 4.1% Wages grew 3.9% in past year (well above 2.7% inflation)

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— Heather Long (@byheatherlong.bsky.social) January 10, 2025 at 7:46 AM

In fact, Wall Streeters thought the jobs report was too good. And the stock market had a significant drop as a result.

US stocks plunged Friday as investors digested a better-than-expected jobs report that soured expectations of future rate cuts from the Federal Reserve.

The Dow dropped by 697 points, closing at 41,938, while the S&P 500 fell by 1.5% and the tech-heavy Nasdaq index was lower by 1.6%....

Rising yields signal concern about a stronger-than-expected economy, resurgent inflation and potentially fewer rate cuts in 2025 than anticipated.

“The strong jobs report sent yields higher amid expectations for the Fed to pause its rate cutting cycle for a significant period of time,” Ross Mayfield, an investment strategist at Baird, wrote in a note Friday.

Oh no! Can't have too many people working and making money at their jobs. How's that any good for continual profits? Although I have suspicions that the Trump/GOPs have some plans to deal with that "problem".

I'll put in the caveat that this jobs number is before we have the annual benchmarking that happens next month, where the previous monthly reports are closer matched to later data. And we know that there is likely to be a downward revision as a result of that, which means that there will likely be a slowing of job growth for both 2024 and 2023.

However, we still had average job growth of 160,000-170,000 per month, and given that we started 2024 at an unemployment rate below 4%, that's remarkable.

As usual, the biggest gainer was the health care sector, which added another 46,000 jobs in December and 681,000 jobs for 2024. After losing people during the depths of the COVID and being slow to recover as the pandemic re-fired in the winter of 2021, there have been nearly 2 million jobs added in Health Care since the end of 2021.

On the goods side of employment, construction saw another month of seasonally adjusted gains (+8,000) and nearly 200,000 for the year. But manufacturing employment continued to struggle, losing 13,000 jobs in December, 40,000 since September, and 88,000 since May. Then throw in the losses that were projected in the initial benchamrking process, and this time next month, we may find out that there were fewer manufacturing jobs than there were at the start of the Biden Administration.

The decline in manufacturing jobs in 2024 is something to keep our eyes on for next year, to see if that continues, or if the large number of factories that have been being built over the last 2 years starts translating into added employment.

The manufacturing losses are one of the few downsides of what was otherwise an economically successful 4 years for America under Joe Biden. Yes, things cost more than they did in December 2020, but on the average Americans made more money during Biden's term in office, and more people got jobs and kept working.

Now the Former Guy is going to walk into a full employment, growing economy as he takes office in January 2025.

No president has ever gotten a better economy handed to him that Donald Trump.

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— Dean Baker (@deanbaker13.bsky.social) January 11, 2025 at 10:50 AM

So let's see the results as Trump/GOP try to screw up what's been working for the 2020s in this country. We need to remember what things are like now, and compare it to what things will look like next year, and the year after that, and the year after that.