Jobs Galore as Spending Booms and Fed Frowns

A Jolt From The Jobs Market

Federal Reserve Board chairman Jay Powell wants to ease what he sees as an unhealthily hot labor market. He and his colleagues have raised the Bank’s policy benchmark interest rate ten times in the past fourteen months, from approximately zero to 5-5.25 per cent, a sixteen-year high. If they believed the consensus forecast  that last month’s job creation revised figure of 294,000 would decline to 190,000 in May, they were shocked on Friday when the Labor Department reported that the economy added 339,000 jobs last month.