Today the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported jobs data for December 2017. Payroll jobs grew to 148,000 which means that the longest job expansion streak continues, now for 87 months.
87… As in 87 consecutive months of jobs growth, by far the longest streak in history. #payrolls
My prediction for the number of jobs created monthly for 2017 was this:
“However, look for job creation numbers monthly to come down to 140K-170K a month”
https://loganmohtashami.com/2016/12/31/2017-housing-economic-predictions/
As of today, without future revisions, we end the year with roughly 171,000 jobs created per month which is the slowest rate of growth in many years. This should have been expected considering our slow population growth and the length of the economic expansion.
(A must follow on twitter)
With Dec payrolls at +148k, average gain for 2017 was +171k — a modest slowdown from previous years but impressive for this long a recovery.
Since 2014 in all my economic prediction articles I have lowered my monthly creation numbers which was the right call and once again for 2018 I am lowering them again to a range of 159,000 – 127,000. For a full outlook at my 2018 Economic & Housing Prediction you can find it here
https://loganmohtashami.com/2017/12/31/2018-economic-housing-predictions/
A breakdown of the jobs data from BLS is here:
https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-unemployment-rate.htm#
The breakdown of the wage data is here:
We saw good gains in manufacturing and construction jobs and losses in retail trade jobs. All in all, 2017 was a solid year for job growth with job creation numbers well above population growth. This has been a bad year, however, for those trying to sell the silly notion that 96,000,000 Americans are out of work, sitting at home since 2010 while over 154,000,000 Americans are working today.
More on the BLS report is here:
“Total nonfarm payroll employment increased by 148,000 in December, and the unemployment rate
was unchanged at 4.1 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Employment gains
occurred in health care, construction, and manufacturing”
The African-American unemployment rate did hit a record low today but it is still at 6.8%. We still have a lot more work to do in this country to get even more people employed.
A longer term perspective of the job data below. I still can’t circle a time period where we lost 96,000,000 million workers. (Snicker)
From Doug Short:
https://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/2018/01/05/the-big-four-economic-indicators-december-nonfarm-employment
Logan Mohtashami is a financial writer and blogger covering the U.S. economy with a specialization in the housing market. Logan Mohtashami is a senior loan officer at AMC Lending Group, which has been providing mortgage services for California residents since 1987. Logan also tracks all economic data daily on his own facebook page https://www.facebook.com/Logan.Mohtashami