Make No Mistake - Friday's Employment News Wasn't Good
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Never let it be said government data -
and the market's response to it - isn't interesting. We got a surprising drop in the unemployment rate with this morning's report from the Department of Labor
despite the fact that job growth was fairly anemic last month.
Like we told you in yesterday's newsletter, we weren't looking for anything outside of the recent range between 150K and 200K for the new-jobs number from the DOL. We ended up with 169,000 new jobs last month (or 152,000 new private-payroll jobs). That was, however, enough to whittle the unemployment rate down to 7.3%, suggesting progress that I frankly don't think the market was expecting so see.