00:00 Speaker A
50,000 is the headline number. 50,000 versus the 70,000 that had been estimated. The unemployment rate however, coming down more than anticipated to 4.4%. So, those are the two headline numbers, 50,000 jobs added to the US economy in December versus the 70,000 estimated and uh the unemployment rate ticking down to 4.4% from 4.6% in November. Average hourly earnings in line with estimates rising 0.3%. Um average weekly hours at 34.2 and the labor force participation rate in line with what economists have been looking for at 62.4% versus 62 and a half%. So, those are the overall numbers. I’m going to start digging in here under the hood to see what kind of revisions we’re getting. It looks like at least for the prior month, for the month of October, we had some uh or the month of November, I should say we had some downward revisions. We’ll see how far back that goes. Um but I’ll dig in as well to see where we saw additions and subtractions. Joe, your sort of first blush reaction, blush reaction here.
01:14 Joe
We we only need 50,000 jobs a month to keep labor conditions stable. That’s what we got. almost spot on with the 51,000 3-month moving average moving into this. So, we’ll want to open this up and decompose it a little bit, look at the internals. I did notice there was an 8,000 decline in manufacturing, the manufacturing sector for all all intense and purposes, is just stagnant right now. That has a lot to do with tariff policy. So, we’ll open this up and take a look at it. The unemployment rate did decline to 4.4%. Now I had it going down to 4.5. So, we got a little bit of an overshoot. I want to see what the deal is if that’s because a lot of people left the labor force. And look everybody, we’re going to get a big benchmark revision next month. We expect on average 60 to 80,000 decline per month in total job creation. So these numbers are all going to look very different 30 days from now.
02:08 Speaker A
Okay, I’m going to come back to that provisions a little bit later, but just to talk more about what we’re seeing in reaction to these numbers, good enough for the market, Steve? Like how should we be viewing it from that perspective? It looks like futures are ticking up a little bit on these numbers.
02:30 Steve
Again, there’s not enough here to to upset the the stock index futures. Um the bo, you know, I’m looking at bond yields up a couple of basis points. Uh the curve really hasn’t changed very much. It’s sort of it’s sort of in the same place we were. Uh call it about 68 basis points between two’s, ten’s, which I am trying to one of my one of my fears is that we get a bit beyond 70, 75 on that one. and that I think gets and I see Joe you’re agreeing with me. Yes. Um that one I think would be problematic. We’re still in that watch and wait range there. Um you know, I think as Joe said, the you know, think about it this way. You know, 20,000 jobs in an economy that has how many million, how many, 170 million workers give or take, you know, talk about like, you know, an eyelash difference. I think these are these are okay. There’s nothing in here to to change perceptions uh too dramatically one way or the other.
03:41 Speaker A
And just to give a little bit of what I mentioned under the hood um in terms of the details of this report. Healthcare continues to be an area of strength in the job market. Um it saw a gain of uh 21,000 overall. Um food services and drinking places, restaurants and bars in other words, also saw pretty strong gains of 27,000 and social assistant, assistance continue to see increases. In terms of where there were declines, retail jobs down by 25,000. Um so that is quite interesting especially at a time when it was the holiday shopping season and remember these are seasonally adjusted numbers, so it’s, you know, they account for some of those changes. So, interesting here. Federal government employment little changed in December up 2,000, that’s something to continue to watch too, you know, again, because of the sort of shake out from the government shutdown. So, those are just a few of the numbers that caught my eye.