U.S. Adds 236K Jobs in March Versus Forecasts for 239K
Bitcoin was little changed at $27,900 in the minutes following the roughly in-line report.
Apr 7, 2023 at 12:38 p.m. UTC:format(webp)/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/coindesk/5L52DKJRMJCOVP6CZ6X3ROWVIY.jpg)
The U.S. jobs market continued to show signs of strength as the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported the addition of 236,000 jobs in March versus economist forecasts for 239,000.
Alongside, the BLS reported the unemployment rate dipping to 3.5% from 3.6% in February and against expectations for 3.6%.
February's gain of 311,000 jobs was revised higher to 326,000.
The price of bitcoin (BTC) was steady at about $27,000 in the immediate aftermath of the report.
Friday morning's payrolls report is the final one before the U.S. Federal Reserve's Federal Open Market Committee's May 2-3 meeting. At that point the central bank will decide whether to continue tightening monetary policy or pausing its long series of rate hikes. Ahead of the report, short-term rate futures markets were pricing in about a two-in-three chance the Fed would pause rate hikes in May.
Data from earlier this week began to hint at some weakness in the labor market, with ADP on Wednesday reporting just 145,000 private-sector jobs added in March versus 210,000 expected. Then on Thursday, the Department of Labor reported weekly initial jobless claims of 228,000 against forecasts for just 200,000. In addition, the previous week's 192,000 initial claims was revised up to 246,000.
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Stephen Alpher is CoinDesk's managing editor for Markets. He holds BTC above CoinDesk’s disclosure threshold of $1,000.