Employers Keep On Hiring More People, Driving Unemployment Near Multi-Year Low Levels

A string of aggressive Federal Reserve hikes has failed to cool off the U.S labor market. The nation's employers keep on hiring more people and the unemployment rate hovers at multi-year low levels.

That's according to a U.S Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) report released on Friday morning showing that the U.S economy added 263,000 non-farm jobs in September, slightly below market forecasts. Most of the job gains were in the leisure and hospitality sector (83,000), health care (60,000), business services (46,000), and manufacturing (22,000).

Continued job gains helped push the September unemployment rate down to 3.5%, below market expectations of 3.7%, meaning that the labor market remains tight.

Labor force participation dropped to 62.3% in September from 64.1% in August, reinforcing the thesis of a tight labor market, which put pressure on wages and, eventually, on the price of goods and services.

"Once again, we are seeing strong job growth in September's report, and job numbers continue to follow a nontraditional path," said Armstrong, President of Recruiting at Safeguard Global, a provider of workforce management solutions, in an email to International Business Times. "The labor shortage is real. We are seeing candidates who have reprioritized their work experience and some effects from a shrinking workforce."

Cody Harker, Head of Data and Insights, from Bayard Advertising, a recruitment marketing company, is of a similar opinion.

"Today's jobs report indicates the job market is chugging along, albeit at a slower pace, as available jobs still outnumber job seekers 1.7 to 1, and employer demand for talent remains elevated," he told IBT.

The solid job gains came despite the Fed's aggressive monetary tightening. Unfortunately, its efforts to cool off the labor market have yet to yield the right results, and more interest rate hikes are in the offing.

That's a big disappointment to Wall Street bulls who have been back to the game last week, hoping that the Fed is very close to ending interest rate hikes. Thus, the big sell-off in equities followed the jobs report's release.

But Russell Evans, the chief investment officer of Los Angeles-based Avitas Wealth Management, sees a silver lining for the Fed.

"Friday's jobs report is an important memo for the Federal Reserve that the employment picture is starting to weaken and inflation may be tamer in the near future, which would bode well for the argument of pausing its rate hikes, something that would be well-received by markets," he told IBT.

Gus Faucher, Chief Economist at the PNC Financial Group, sees a difficult task ahead for the nation's central bank.

"The Fed is hoping to cool off growth enough to bring inflation back down to 2% over the next year or two without causing a recession," he told IBT. "But the central bank could easily overdo it, raising interest rates too much and pushing the U.S. economy into contraction."