December NFP +252K

The December jobs report is out. The economy created 252,000 net new jobs last month. The unemployment rate fell to 5.6%. (Or 5.565% to be precise.)

The NFP for October was revised higher by 18,000, and the one for December was revised higher by 50,000.

The shocker was that average hourly earnings fell by 0.2%. Economists were expecting an increase of 0.2%.

Here’s a look at the growth of NFP:

Here’s the annualized seasonally-adjusted rate of change for average hourly earnings:

We’ll get the December CPI report next week. As weak as AHE was, there’s a chance it was higher than the deflation we had. In other words, it could be that real wages rose last month.

Posted by Eddy Elfenbein on January 9th, 2015 at 8:30 am

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