Research
The Crack Arrives. The Floor Holds.
The June employment report landed this morning, and it landed soft. Nonfarm payrolls rose just 57,000, short of the 110,000 consensus, below even the lowest estimate on the street, and down from 172,000 the month before. Private hiring, the cleaner read, slowed to 49,000 from 120,000. The unemployment rate actually ticked down, to 4.2% from 4.3%, but for the wrong reason: participation slipped to 61.5% from 61.8%, so the rate fell because the labour force shrank, not because jobs were plentiful. This is the labour crack. And the one number that did not soften was the price of labour: average hourly earnings accelerated to 3.5% on the year, up from 3.4%. Hiring is cracking; wage inflation is not. That combination is the whole reason the floor holds.
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