Despite layoffs and hiring freezes at Big Tech firms including Amazon and Meta, the labor market has proved to be incredibly resilient. The U.S. economy added 517,000 jobs last month, topping economists’ estimates and pushing the unemployment rate to a 53-year low of 3.4%.
Forecasters hadn’t anticipated the robust jobs report, given the Federal Reserve’s yearlong campaign of interest rate hikes to fight persistent inflation, which typically causes higher unemployment. Even Fed Chair Jerome Powell said Tuesday at the Economic Club of Washington, D.C., that the report was “stronger than anyone I know expected.”
