PARIS (Reuters) – The American economy created significantly more jobs than expected in September but wage growth has stabilized, the Labor Department’s monthly report showed on Friday.
This report shows 336,000 non-agricultural jobs created last month while economists polled by Reuters forecast an average of only 170,000. Their estimates ranged from 90,000 to 256,000.
The August figure was also revised upwards, to 227,000 instead of 187,000 announced in the first estimate.
The unemployment rate, for its part, stabilized at 3.8% in September like the previous month while the consensus was forecasting a decline to 3.7%.
The Labor Department’s report also shows that the average hourly wage increased by 0.2% in September, as in August, bringing its growth over one year to 4.2%, against forecasts of +0 on average respectively. .3% and +4.3%.
The dynamism of the labor market could encourage the American Federal Reserve (Fed) to continue its monetary tightening, started in March 2022, for longer than expected.
On Wall Street, index futures turned downward, with a decline of 0.49% for the Dow Jones, 0.98% for the Standard & Poor’s 500 and 1.21% for the Nasdaq. The yield on ten-year Treasuries, for its part, rose by 16.7 basis points, to 4.8641%. The dollar, for its part, erased all its losses, now gaining 0.40%, against a basket of reference currencies.
In the wake of the publication of the US employment report, traders on Friday raised their expectations for Fed rate hikes by the end of the year.
The implied yields of contracts linked to the Fed’s key rate have thus increased, giving a probability of almost 50% that the Fed will raise the federal funds rate to a range of 5.50% to 5.75% at its meeting of December.
Before the jobs report, that probability was only about 34%.
The Fed left its rates unchanged at the September meeting and the market has since been betting on a new status quo in November and December despite recent restrictive statements from several officials of the American central bank.
(Written by Claude Chendjou, with Ann Saphir, edited by Bertrand Boucey and Blandine Hénault)
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