US labor market adds 142K jobs in August, unemployment drops

142,000 jobs were added to the US labor market in August, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics's jobs report, below economist expectations for 165,000 nonfarm payroll jobs. Additionally, the unemployment rate eased down to 4.2% from 4.3% in July, while US hourly earnings ticked up to 3.8% year-over-year.

Brad Smith and Madison Mills break down the data from this morning's fresh economic data.

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This post was written by Luke Carberry Mogan.

Video Transcript

And we have 142,000 jobs added during the month of August.

And that is the headline number that's weaker than expected.

And the expectation was 100 65,000.

So that weaker than expected, you also saw the unemployment rate come in as expected 4.2% average hourly earnings month over month that came in at 4/10 of a percent.

So just to tick hotter than what was expected at the 3/10 of a percent and then average hourly earnings year over year, we tell our, we told our viewers 3.7% was the figure to watch there 3.8% is where it actually came in at.

And so as we're taking a look at some of the reaction here in the futures, as of right now, we're still flat for the dow, but we're still in negative territory across the S and P 500 the NASDAQ at this juncture Matty.

Yeah, it's really interesting because we're seeing under the huddle a couple of data points.

I want to point out the number of people on temporary layoffs declined by 190,000 over the month of August, the number of permanent job losers was essentially unchanged.

He also had the long term unemployed, virtually unchanged labor force participation rate remaining at 62.7%.

In August little changed over the year.

I'm getting a lot of little change here and coming in just below that expected number by the tune of about 20,000 here.

So that might be why we are seeing the major averages pairing their earlier losses, the nada pairing it losses in particular here as it starts to correct.

But it will be interesting to see how the market continues to digest this data particularly across the yield curve as well as we start to kind of look under the hood at the data in terms of what it means for the broader averages.

Here, I do want to note construction employment rising by 34,000 that is higher than the average monthly gain of 19,000, not a huge shift, but that was something that we were interested in looking at as an indicator of where the housing market is heading.

So that could be a sign that we are continuing to have a little bit of construction in the broader housing market there.