January Jobs reached 467,000 to beat the 150,000 Wall Street expectations despite a surge in Omicron cases. The Bureau of Labor Statistics also reported Friday that the unemployment rate grew to 4%, barely above the 3.9% Dow Jones estimate.
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January Jobs Grow
As informed by CNBC, the U.S. added 456,000 new jobs in January against a 150,000 Wall Street prediction and despite the increasing number of Omicron cases that kept many workers on the sidelines.
A week earlier, the White House had warned that the number of jobs added for the month would be low, while the CDC said Covid cases have dived cross-country in recent weeks, “with the seven-day moving average down more than 50% since peaking in mid-January.”
A revision of previous months also shows that added jobs were higher in December, which went up from 199,000 to 510,000. In November, the number initially reported was 249,000 and then hit 709,000.
“The revisions came as part of the annual adjustments from the BLS that saw sizeable changes for many of the months in 2021.”
Milestone
The adjustment means that the total of jobs added in the U.S. in 2021 was 6.665 million, the biggest in the history of the country.
Kathy Jones, chief fixed income strategist at Charles Schwab, said: “The benchmark revisions helped the numbers a bit just because it moved out some of the seasonal factors that have been at work. But overall the job market is strong, particularly in the face of omicron.”
Ian Shepherdson, chief economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics, noted, “These data make it clear that the labor market ahead of Omicron was much stronger than previously believed, and it’s very tempting to argue that the [January] data mean that all danger of an Omicron hit has passed,” wrote Ian Shepherdson, chief economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics. ”
“We’re a bit more cautious than that, not least because the near-real-time data fell through most of [January] and have only just begun to recover,” he added.
