Uptodown-id - US Adds 161,000 New Jobs Ahead of Election
November 04, 2016 at 10:14PM
The last unemployment report before Americans elect their next president on November 8 shows businesses added 161,000 new non-farm jobs in October, nudging the unemployment rate down to 4.9 percent from 5 percent the previous month. The tepid Labor Department report is below forecasts by economists who predicted in a Bloomberg survey that 178,000 new jobs would be created in October. The October numbers fall short of those from the first nine months of 2016, when an average of 178,000 per month were added. The latest jobless report is another indication of a durable but lukewarm economy. A tighter labor market seems to produce wage growth, with the average hourly pay rising 10 cents an hour to an average $25.92. Wages are now 2.8 percent higher than they were a year ago, the biggest 12-month increase in seven years. But higher wages and relatively low unemployment tell only part of the story. There are 7.8 million unemployed people in the U.S., a number that has shown little movement since August 2015.
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