UNITED STATES: JOB CREATIONS WELL LOWER THAN EXPECTATIONS IN APRIL
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WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The rebound in job creation suffered a sharp and unexpected drag in April, likely due to a labor shortage, despite economic activity rebounding with improving health context and massive budget support, official statistics show Friday.
The Labor Department recorded 266,000 non-farm job creations last month, while economists polled by Reuters predicted an average of 978,000.
Those for March were revised down to 770,000 after an initial estimate of 916,000.
The jobs report shows a drop in temporary jobs as well as a drop in manufacturing and distribution employment, which could reinforce criticism of the government’s large unemployment benefits.
These were extended as part of the $ 1.9 trillion support plan adopted by Congress in March to deal with the consequences of the pandemic.
The unemployment rate, calculated on the basis of a separate survey from the one on job creation, rose to 6.1% while the Reuters consensus gave it down to 5.8% after 6.0% on last month.
But this indicator is not considered, in the United States, as a faithful measure of the evolution of the labor market because it is biased by the fact that some of the people questioned to calculate it are wrongly classified as “employees. but absent from their work “, which results in him being undervalued.
These numbers are unlikely to alter expectations for strong growth in the US economy this year.
The 10-year US government bond yield fell after the statistic was released, falling to 1.4690%, its lowest since early March, before falling back to 1.547%.
The dollar fell against a basket of benchmark currencies.
On the stock market, the futures contract on the Nasdaq, with a strong technological component and very sensitive to rates, increased its gains to take 1% while that on the Dow Jones went into the red.
(Lucia Mutikani, French version Laetitia Volga, edited by Patrick Vignal)
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