Not bad for a Muslim president who hates America:
Continuing a trend of solid job gains, the U.S. economy added 252,000 jobs in December, and the unemployment rate fell to 5.6%.
The job gains were stronger than analysts had expected, and the unemployment rate is now 0.2% lower than in the previous month. Overall, 2014 marked the strongest year of job gains since 1999, adding 2.95 million new jobs total and an average monthly gain of 246,000.
“Although job gains did not match the tremendous November increased, they were nonetheless strong and indicative of momentum in the labor market that is expected to continue in 2015,” said Sophia Koropeckyj, senior economist and managing director for Moody’s Analytics. The firm expects monthly job gains to pick up and exceed 300,000 by the end of the year.
But December’s report also pointed to the underlying weaknesses of the economic recovery: stagnant wages and low participation in the labor force. Average wages fell 0.2% in December, after seeing a 0.4% rise the previous month, driving down 2014’s overall wage gains to just 1.7%.
The story on wages is less encouraging. The widely touted November jump in wages was almost completely reversed, with the December data showing a 5-cent drop from a downwardly revised November figure. The average over the last three months grew at a 1.1 percent annual rate compared with the average of the prior three months, down from a 1.7 percent growth rate over the last year. This may be due in part to a shift to lower paying jobs in restaurants, retail, and the lower-paying portions of the health care industry. However, it is also possible that we are just seeing anomalous data.