Nearly 7 Million New Jobs in Last 3 Years

The December Jobs Report was released last Friday and the numbers were very close to predictions. Here are the facts-

• Our economy created 145k jobs last month.
• The last 2 months' numbers were revised downward by a combined 14k.
• The household survey revealed job creation of 267k and the labor force grew by 209k people.
• The unemployment rate remained at 3.50%.
• The U6 unemployment rate dropped 0.2% to 6.7%.
• The percentage of willing job leavers rose to 14.5% which is near it's high in this economic cycle.
• Surprisingly weekly earnings were up only 2.3% year over year. Peter Boockvar noted in his report that this data "doesn't square with higher wages he's seeing in other data."

 Here's how job growth per month has looked over months and years-

• Last 3 months-184k new jobs
• Last 6 months-189k new jobs
• 2019-176k new jobs
• 2018-223k new jobs
• 2017-179k new jobs
• 2016-193k new jobs

 The unemployment rate ended 2016 at 4.7% which was a very good number. And to see our economy add 6.94 million new jobs is very impressive when your starting point was a low 4.7% unemployment rate.