The headline is, the labor market appears to be stabilizing.
Today, the Bureau of Labor Statistics came out with one of the year's most anticipated data dumps,
a report on hiring and firing in January, and a revision of the jobs numbers from last year.
Molly Smith, a Bloomberg U.S.
economy editor, says that heading into today, economists' expectations had been low.
We keep seeing these huge job cut announcements coming out of big companies,
and that seems to be making a lot of big news and making people really anxious about the job market.
But you get a report like this, and it's like,
well, there was a lot of really positive things that happened.
The U.S.
economy added 130,000 jobs last month, according to the BLS report.
Far more than economists were projecting.
and the unemployment rate actually dropped to 4.3%.
The takeaway?
The 2026 labor market could be stronger than we thought.
To see the way that the January numbers came in,
not just the beat in hiring, but also the drop in the unemployment rate,
which was not expected, really just showed that the labor market seems to be gaining its footing.
But Molly says the other takeaway is that the labor market of 2025 was weaker than originally reported.
The pace of hiring originally last year was around 49,000 jobs added per month on average.