Weak growth likely to nudge unemployment rate higher

WASHINGTON — U.S. employers added 165,000 jobs in April, and hiring was much stronger in the previous two months than the government first estimated. The job increases helped reduce the unemployment rate from 7.6% to a four-year low of 7.5%. The report Friday from the Labor Department was a reassuring sign that the U.S. job market is improving despite higher taxes and government spending cuts that took effect this year.

Tomorrow, we get official numbers on how many jobs the U.S. economy created in April. The median estimate among market economists surveyed by Bloomberg is for 140,000 new nonfarm payrolls, up from last month's dismal 88,000 figure.

The US economy added a more-than-expected 244,000 jobs in April, but the country's unemployment rate rose to 9.0 percent from 8.8 percent in March, the Labor Department said Friday.Analysts on average expected 185,000 nonfarm jobs were created in April, a drop of 14 percent from March, and that unemployment would hold unchanged after falling for four consecutive months.The private sector added 268,000 jobs, sharply higher than the 200,000 expected.

With the March Payroll number printing at a miserable 88K compared to ADP's 158K print, it was only a matter of time before Mark Zandi, still furious from getting the news he won't be the next GSE Tzar, revised the last month's data to 131K as he just did. Concurrently he also announced that the just released April ADP was a huge miss to expectations of 150K, printing at just 119K, or a 31K miss. This was the 5th month in a row of declines excluding the small bounce in February data.

WASHINGTON — U.S. job growth grew modestly in January and gains in the prior two months were bigger than initially reported, supporting views the economy’s sluggish recovery was on track despite a surprise contraction in output in the final three months of 2012. Employers added 157,000 jobs to their payrolls last month, the Labor Department said on Friday. There were 127,000 more jobs created in November and December than previously reported. The unemployment rate, however, edged up 0.1 percentage point to 7.9%.

As a followup to my earlier post, Housing Starts and the Unemployment Rate, Professor Amir Sufi sent me this graph of the unemployment rate and residential construction by state.