CNN business reporter Matt Egan said on Thursday that the jobs market has defied negative forecasts.
The U.S. economy added 147,000 nonfarm payroll jobs in June, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data published on Thursday. Egan, on “CNN News Central,” noted that both the job creation figure and the unemployment rate came in better than anticipated. (RELATED: Chinese Firms Fleeing US Exchanges As Trump Turns Up Heat On Beijing)
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“This jobs market is like the Energizer Bunny. Every single time we expect it to run out of steam, it just keeps going and going. So these new numbers show that the U.S. economy added 147,000 jobs in June,” Egan said. “That was well ahead of the expectation of about 118,000, well ahead of some whispers that we heard on Wall Street of a sub-100,000 number.”
“So this is indeed beating expectations. We were also expecting a slowdown,” he continued. “We did not get that. This is basically in line with May, which was revised higher. It’s also good news.”
The BLS revised April and May job numbers upward by a combined 16,000 jobs — 11,000 for April and 5,000 for May.
“The unemployment rate was expected to go up. It didn’t. It went down to 4.1%. That is a very healthy number. This is still relatively historically low. And again, it’s below the 4.3% that we had expected,” Egan added. “When we look at the trend in the jobs market, you can see that things have slowed down from last year, but not in an alarming fashion.”
“We did expect to have weaker numbers here in the last few months. And so really, things are holding up a lot better than feared,” he said. “The unemployment rate, again, it’s nowhere near where it was a few years ago.”
A poll conducted in May by the Job Creators Network Foundation (JCNF), first shared with the Daily Caller News Foundation, found that 58% of small business owners said they felt “optimistic” that President Donald Trump’s administration would help small businesses.
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