U.S. unemployment in April lowest in 50 years

About 12,000 jobs were added in April in the financial sector. File Photo by John Angelillo/UPI

May 3 (UPI) — The United States added 263,000 jobs in April, while the unemployment rate declined to 3.6 percent, the lowest since 1969, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday.

The unemployment rate declined 0.2 percent in April as the number of unemployed Americans fell by 387,000 to 5.8 million. This comes two days after the Federal Reserve decided to keep interest rates steady.

“It’s clearly telling you this economy is still chugging along very nicely,” Torsten Slok, chief economist at Deutsche Bank Securities, said on Bloomberg Television. “It is inflationary in the sense that wages did go up, but they didn’t go up as much as we had expected. Goldilocks is the best description of this.”

The non-farm payroll growth beat Wall Street expectations of 190,000 jobs and a jobless rate of 3.8 percent.

Revised numbers for February and March show an additional 16,000 jobs were created.

The retail sector lost 12,000 jobs in April. Social assistance grew by 26,000 jobs. Healthcare added 27,000 jobs, while the financial sector added 12,000. Construction grew by 33,000.

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