The Donald Trump effect on the US job market seemed dismal as the US labor department Friday reported the numbers.
Revisions showed a whopping 258,000 jobs had been overestimated in May and June. The unemployment rate ticked higher to 4.2 per cent as Americans dropped out of the labor force and the ranks of the unemployed rose by 221,000.
US employers added just 73,000 jobs last month, well short of the 115,000 expected, the Associated Press reported.
US hiring, it said, is slowing sharply as Trump’s “erratic and radical trade policies paralyse businesses and raise doubts about the outlook for the world’s largest economy”.
The Hill reported that revisions in estimates of jobs added are not unusual but the sheer number in this case was staggering. “...the scale of the revisions — and what they said about the economy — stunned experts and investors after a week of relatively solid economic data,” The Hill said.
“Hiring has hit a wall in the U.S. Substantial downward revisions in payrolls means that private sector hiring has averaged a little more than 50,000 jobs over the past three months,” The Hill quoted Bankrate senior economic analyst Mark Hamrick as writing in an analysis.
The job figures will not be good news for Trump as he rewrites the rules of global trade through tariffs that most analysts say will lead to price rise in America.
“This is a game-changer jobs report. The labour market is deteriorating quickly,” Heather Long, chief economist at the Navy Federal Credit Union, told AP. “The economy needs certainty soon on tariffs. The longer this tariff whiplash lasts, the more likely this weak hiring environment turns into lay-offs.”