U.S. nonfarm payrolls rise strongly in January, jobless rate rises marginally to 4 pct

U.S. job market started on a strong footing in 2019. Nonfarm payrolls rose 304k in January. This is a downwardly revised but still strong December hiring tally. Hiring averaged 241k new jobs per month in the last three months, only a bit below the 254k pace seen in December.

The jobless rate rose marginally to 4 percent in the month, lifted by government workers who were furloughed in the government shutdown. In the household survey reference week, approximately 380k federal employees were neither working nor being paid, and would have been classified as unemployed. Thus, the rise in the jobless rate is likely to be reversed in February.

The BLS underlined that the number of people working part-time for economic reasons was also expected to have been stimulated by the government shutdown. The widest measure of unemployment rose from 7.6 percent to 8.1 percent in January.

The good news in the household survey was another rise in the participation rate to 63.2 percent. The rate is now up 0.5 percentage points in the past year as a solid labor market draws in a greater share of workers.

In the payrolls data, hiring was solid in leisure and hospitality, construction, health care and transportation and warehousing. As anticipated, there were no discernible effects of the partial federal government shutdown on the estimates of employment, hours, and earnings from the establishment survey.

The closely watched measure of wage growth was slightly weaker than expected, rising 0.1 percent on the month. On a year-on-year basis, wages rose 3.2 percent January. After revisions, wage growth has now been running above 3 percent since August.

“As outlined in our recent forecast the pace of growth in the U.S. economy is likely to slow over the course of 2019, and hiring is expected to slow along with it, but there is little signs of that yet in recent data. Even with half the pace of monthly gains recorded over the last several months, the unemployment rate will continue to drift lower through the year”, said TD Economics in a research report.

At 16:00 GMT the FxWirePro's Hourly Strength Index of US Dollar was neutral at -5.03635 more details on FxWirePro's Currency Strength Index, visit http://www.fxwirepro.com/currencyindex