The economy of the United States has added data which is better than expected in the month of January as 225,000 jobs have been added and the unemployment rate has been ticked up to a level of 3.6%. The average wage growth per hour has also improved from what it was one year ago. Despite the strong reports though, the markets have stayed down as the Dow Jones fell down after the records it hit on Thursday.
Wall Street had made an expectation of the jobs report for January to show a gain of as many as 160,000 jobs in the previous month and the economists had forecast a wage growth of 3% and the employment rate of 3.5%.
The job gains had been revised up for December and November by a combination of 7,000. The monthly average of payroll gains over the last three reports had been a strong at the level of 211,000.
The weak spot though was a shorter workweek. The Americans had managed to clock for the third consecutive month a level of 34.3 hours which was way below the expectations and this means that in spite of the better growth in wages, the weekly gains in pay have seen a slow down to a level of 2.5%.
Even as the hiring picked up. The economy wide weekly growth in payment was only 4.0% form the last year levels for a second month in a row and this is the slowest the pace has been since the month of October in the year 2017 and that was a complete point below the levels which had been there in the year 2018.
