Friday brought further signs that the US economy is recovering from its weather-inflicted stall in the first quarter.
Employment increased 288,000 in April, well up from 203,000 in March. The unemployment rate fell to 6.3 percent from 6.7 percent, although that was mostly due to a fall in the labour force by more than 800,000.
Michael Derby at Real Time Economics says that, according to a jobs calculator from the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, if “the economy can keep up something like the current rate of monthly job gains, unemployment could fall by year end to the top of the range Fed officials’ say they expect over the long run”, which could “rev up the debate over when to start raising short-term interest rates”.
Indeed, following the employment report, traders are now betting that the Fed is as likely as not to raise rates as soon as next June, about six weeks earlier than traders had forecast before the report.
Also boding well for the US economy was a report on Friday showing that new orders for factory goods rose 1.1 percent in March.
Data on Friday also showed improvement for the eurozone economy. Markit's eurozone manufacturing PMI rose to 53.4 in April from 53.0 in March, with all national PMIs above 50 and indicating growth for the first time since November 2007.
The eurozone unemployment rate of 11.8 percent for March, however, remained near a record high.
Earlier on Friday, Japan had reported that household spending jumped 7.2 percent in March compared to the previous year as consumers rushed to buy ahead of the rise in the sales tax on 1 April. The unemployment rate was unchanged at 3.6 percent.
However, in an early indicator of the post-tax consumption trend, data on Friday showed that Japanese vehicle sales fell 5.5 percent in April.
No comments:
Post a Comment