纽约时报对美国就业市场的分析

The Job Market Isn’t as Strong as It Seemed. The Fed Needs to Pay Attention.

The clearest evidence yet that the economic slowdown isn’t a figment of the bond market’s imagination.

Neil Irwin

By Neil Irwin

June 7, 2019

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A Mercedes-Benz factory in Vance, Ala.

A Mercedes-Benz factory in Vance, Ala.CreditAndrew Caballero-Reynolds/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

As of 8:29 a.m. Friday, things were shaping up for the Federal Reserve to face a real conundrum at its policy meeting in less than two weeks.

Some financial market indicators, mainly in the bond market, were suggesting that the economy was weakening and that the Fed would need to cut interest rates in the coming months to prevent a recession. But there was little evidence of a major slowdown — only a few soft data points here and there.

In particular, the United States labor market has been booming, not at all suggesting an American economy in need of rescue with interest rate policy.

The good news out of the Labor Department’s May employment report released at 8:30 a.m. Friday is that the Fed no longer faces a conundrum. The bad news is that it showed a job market that was not as robust as it had seemed.

It’s not just that the economy added only 75,000 jobs last month, far less than the 180,000 forecast. That might be chalked up to the statistical randomness that can cause the numbers to bounce around in ways that don’t reflect the underlying reality of the economy.

More worrisome is that the report also revised previous months’ numbers down by 75,000, meaning that the blockbuster spring job creation rates were considerably more modest.

It is now clear that there really is softer job creation in 2019 than there was in 2018 — an average of 164,000 jobs a month so far this year, compared with 223,000 last year.

That could reflect the simple math of an economy arriving at full employment. Once nearly everyone who wants a job has one, after all, employers simply can’t create new jobs at the same pace because there is no one out there to fill them.

But some curious pieces of evidence point to underlying weakness. The proportion of prime working-age adults, those 25 to 54, who are working, which rose sharply in 2018, has now leveled off or even edged down. It was 79.9 percent in February, and 79.7 percent in May.

Perhaps most significant, wage growth is also steady or slightly declining, rather than accelerating. Average hourly earnings for private-sector workers rose 0.2 percent in May, and are up 3.1 percent over the last year. Wages rose 3.4 percent in the year ended in February.

If this really were a situation of softening job growth because employers were up against the constraints of full employment, you would expect them t