IE Business Daily Business news for the Inland Empire.
There was good news and not-so-good news in the jobs report released by the U.S. Department of Labor on Friday.
The good news was that the national unemployment rate declined to 4.3 percent, 16-year low, during May.
The not-so-good news was that the economy added only 138,000 non-agricultural jobs last month, well below the 185,000 many economists were expecting. Even worse, March’s 79,000 jobs created got reduced to 50,000, while the April number went from 211,000 to 174,000, according to the report.
Still, the report is nothing to get depressed about, according to one local economist.
“It’s not great, but it does show the economy is still moving in a positive direction,” said Jay Prag, professor of economics and finance at the Drucker School of Management at Claremont Graduate University.
