The US labor market stumbled badly in June. Nonfarm payrolls came in at just 57,000 jobs, roughly half of what economists had projected, and the report landed with the kind of thud that immediately reshuffles how traders think about Federal Reserve policy.
Forecasts had centered on a range of 110,000 to 115,000 new jobs. The actual figure wasn’t close.
What the numbers actually say
The headline miss was jarring, but the revisions made it worse. April and May payrolls were revised downward by a combined 74,000 jobs. May’s figure alone dropped from 172,000 to 129,000.
The unemployment rate did tick down, falling to 4.2% against an expectation of 4.3%. The labor force participation rate slipped to 61.5%, which means the unemployment rate improvement came partly because fewer people were actively looking for work, not because more people found jobs.
