Blowout June Payrolls: 147K Jobs Added, Smashing Expectations; Unemployment Rate Drops To 4.1%

After yesterday’s shockingly badADP print of negative 33K, the market was braced for the worse, with the whisper number for today’s payrolls sliding to 96K, the first sub 100K print and far below the consensus of 106K, and many even contemplating how to trade a stagflationary recession print. In the end, it turned out to be just another headfake by ADP which now has the same credibility as UMich, because moments ago the BLS published a blowout job report: in June, the US added 147K payrolls, blowing away the median estimate of 106K, and higher than the upward revisedMay print of 144K.

Remarkable, and in a dramatic change from the Biden tradition, previous months were revised higher: April was revised up by 11,000, from +147,000 to +158,000, and the change for May was revised up by 5,000, from +139,000 to +144,000.

It wasn’t just the headline print that surprised to the upside: perhaps an even bigger surprise was the unemployment rate which dropped from 4.2% to 4.1%, denying expectations of an increase to 4.3%, and far below the Fed’s recently upward revised estimate of a 4.5%.

The drop in the unemp rate was the result of a 93K increase in employed workers, offset by a decline in the civilian labor force to 173,380K from 170,510K and a drop in the number of unemployed workers from 7,237K to 7,1025K.

Developing