The number of unemployed millennials is shrinking

Over the month, job gains occurred in food manufacturing (+11,000), fabricated metal products (+7,000), and furniture and related products (+3,000).

In January, average hourly earnings for all employees on private nonfarm job payrolls increased by 12 cents to $25.39. The college-level unemployment rate – which can serve as a proxy for professional employment – was 2.5%, unchanged from November and December.

Retail trade added 58,000 jobs in January, following essentially no change in December.

“The wage numbers were the most encouraging bit of news all around”, according to Carl Tannenbaum, chief economist at Northern Trust, who said the figures gave him “extra comfort that the (economic) expansion wasn’t sliding toward an untimely conclusion”.

Specifically, the January report will serve as a reminder that it is too early to fully eliminate the possibility that the Federal Reserve, the most powerful central bank, will raise rates in March.

Of the 205,000 jobs created, 192,000 were in service-oriented industries and only 13,000 in goods-oriented businesses, ADP said.

Meanwhile, the jobless rate in the city of Dayton edged down one-tenth of a percentage point to 5.5 percent last month. Health care has added 470,000 jobs over the past 12 months, with about two-fifths of the growth occurring in hospitals.

At 4.9 percent unemployment, the economy is now in a zone that many economists and Fed governors would consider “full employment”. The January jobs report, with a slowdown in job growth but a pickup in wages, complicates the outlook for the Fed. In addition, the Labor Department revised December’s job gains down to 262,000 from its previous estimate of 292,000, but November’s data was revised up to 280,000 from 252,000.

‘We have recovered from the worst economic crisis since the 1930s, the worst in my lifetime and the lifetime of most of the people in this room, ‘ Obama said, noting the unemployment rate was 10 percent in 2009, when he took office. Wages are up 2.5 percent over where they were a year ago.

The sharp step-down in job gains from the fourth quarter’s brisk clip largely reflected payback after the warmest temperatures in years bolstered hiring in weather-sensitive sectors like construction.

Job growth in January went plop – just like I predicted. Levanon thinks these numbers leave the Fed open to several more rate hikes. “We had this big redistribution from wages to profits in the downturn…Workers should be getting some of the ground back that they lost in downturn”.

The president admitted that there is still stress among Americans, but said the United States market was “more powerful and much more lasting” subsequently ahead of the fiscal crisis. She also pointed to historically-high levels of long-term unemployment (compared to other recession-recovery cycles prior to the Great Recession), teen and minority unemployment, discouraged workers and those who have dropped out of the labor force altogether.