LDN - Business

Four reasons to take a breath after the U.S. jobs report

[August 03, 2024] By Dan Burns

(Reuters) - The disappointing U.S. employment report for July unleashed a "Freakout Friday" moment in financial markets and triggered a wholesale resetting of expectations for how much the Federal Reserve might cut interest rates next month.

There was much to grimace about in the Bureau of Labor Statistics report card on the job market, including a jump in the unemployment rate to a post-pandemic high and the weakest pace of private-sector hiring in 16 months.

That said, the report was not without its bright spots like a second straight month of hefty workforce growth and came with some fat caveats, including a big debate underway about the weather.

Here are four reasons to take a breath and accept that the report may not signal the end is near.

BIG BAD BERYL

The BLS added a big footnote to the first page of Friday's release to say Hurricane Beryl - which slammed into Texas during the employment report survey week and left some 2.7 million homes and businesses in the Houston area without power for days - "had no discernible effect" on the month's data.

A number of economists said: "Whoa!"

For one thing, they said, just look at the number of people who reported not being at work due to bad weather: 436,000 nonfarm workers and 461,000 with agriculture workers included.

That is not just a record for the month of July, it was more than 10 times the July average dating back to 1976 when BLS started tracking the metric. And more than 1 million others could only work part time due to the weather, also a record for the month.

"We are not sure that we absolve Beryl of any responsibility for the weakness in this data," Jefferies U.S. economist Thomas Simons wrote.

TEMPORARY LAYOFFS

The number of people who said their job loss was temporary was the highest in about three years last month and accounted for more than half of the overall increase in the number of unemployed of 352,000.

If their temporary layoffs last only a few weeks or don't become permanent, economists expect most of those people will report as employed in the report for August that will come out next month.

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An employee hiring sign with a QR code is seen in a window of a business in Arlington, Virginia, U.S., April 7, 2023. REUTERS/Elizabeth Frantz/File Photo

Again, Beryl may be a culprit here.

"We think some of those layoffs may have been related to Hurricane Beryl," Oxford Economics Lead U.S. Economist Nancy Vanden Houten wrote.

CONSTRUCTION JOBS STILL HUMMING

Construction work, often a leading indicator of coming shifts in the economy, especially for sectors like home building, continued growing last month at roughly the pace of the last year.

The 25,000 new jobs was also somewhat above the roughly 20,000 construction jobs added on average each month of the five years prior to the pandemic, a period Fed officials often reminisce about.

That could augur for a recovery in housing starts, which have been sluggish for months.

PRIME-AGED PRIME TIME

Economists keep close track of so-called "prime-aged workers" - those between 25 and 54 years old - because they account for such a big chunk of the U.S. workforce.

And those prime-agers are trundling back to the labor force in sizeable numbers.

The prime-aged labor force participation rate rose in July to 84%, the highest since 2001.

For prime-aged men, their rate ticked up to 90% - the first nine-handle since the 2007-2009 financial crisis.

And for prime-aged women, it was back to record territory. At 78.1% last month, the rate matched a record high first set in May.

(Reporting By Dan Burns; Editing by Andrea Ricci)

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