Global business news twenty four hours a day at Bloomberg dot com, the Radio plus Mobile Act and on your radio. This is a Bloomberg Business flash from Bloomberg World Handquarters. I'm Charlie Pellet. Stocks are declining as the SMP five hundred index slips from a seven month high after disappointing a roll gains heightened concerns of growth is fading. The SMP five hundred index down nine points now at two thousand ninety six, to drop there of point four percent.
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one point six percent. I'm Charlie Pellot. That's a Bloomberg business splash. You're listening to taking stock with Kathleen Hays and pim Box on Bloomberg Radio. US companies slowing their hiring in May to just thirty eight thousand jobs. The unemployment rate, though it fell as many people dropped out of the workforce. Here to tell us more about today's report is Heidi Scherholtz, Labor Secretary. Tom Paris is chief economist at the Department of Labor. Heidi, thank you very
much for being with us. Oh, thank you for having me. Now, I want to give you first the opportunity to just explain a little bit about your takeaways from this report, and then I just want to ask you about job opening. So go ahead, gotcha. So the number, when we saw the numbers, they were below expectations. Um. But a key, big chunk of what was of the softness in today's numbers was the Verizon strikers who are out on strike. The good news on that is that those workers are
now back on the job. Um. If you add those Verizon strikers to the thirty eight thousand jobs we get, you're into this. You're into sort of the seventy seventy five thousand range that and sort of. So if that's more the underlying job growth that we saw in May It's still pretty weak, isn't it. Because we were averaging we were averaging two hundred thousand plus. Then we ranched it down about a hundred and sixty net new jobs, and to suddenly dive down to seventy thousand and change
is quite a pullback hiding. And of course there were other signs of weakness. That unemployment rate fell because so many people left the labor force. He said, Typically the kinds of things you see when the labor market is getting weaker, not stronger. What do you think is going on? So one thing to always keep in mind is that these numbers are really volatile months to months. So anytime of the week month we don't get too upset, and time there's a really strong month, we don't get too
giddy about it. If you look over the last three months, it's a much more stable measure. That, though, is still lower than what we've been seeing. So if you look at job growth over the last three months is a hundred and sixteen thousand, that's lower than the rates we were seeing in two fifteen UM. One point on that, though, is that as the labor market tightens, those are the kinds of numbers we may expect to see going forward.
It's sort of as you get close. We're not there yet, but as you get closer to have a really tight labor market, you're just gonna see the job growth slow a little. One of the things that helps to to or sort of comes along with that, is that we will also start seeing faster wage growth, and we did see stronger wage growth so far this year. We're seeing an annualized rate of wage growth at three point two percent.
So what's going on right now is not completely unexpected, but we do where we will be looking to next month to see into definitely monitoring the situation to see if we're if we see that UM rebound next month, I do you know, I don't want to put lipstick on a pig here, But looking at the job's openings report from last month five point eight million job openings
as of the last business day of March. That's from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, is it possible that the statistics that we're talking about today matter slightly less because there is a job's mismatch that is only being intensified because all those people that have the skills that are wanted by employers already have jobs or job offers, so the job One of the things that job openings numbers highlight is a great deal of churn that goes on
in any labor market. So there were also I'm not going to get this number exact, but I think there were about five point five million hires in the in March five point three. There you got, Okay, So the so the most of those job openings get filled every month because you just have a lot of you just there's just a sort of, um perhaps surprising amount of
turn in the labor market. But one thing that I do think those strong job openings numbers point to is that the softer jobs numbers we UH saw today are happening in this context of a lot of other economic indicators that are much stronger. So the jewels numbers were strong. We also see strong retail sales, strong consumer spending. Unemployment insurance claims have been below three hundred thousand per week for the last sixty five weeks. That's the longest record
for the longest streak below three three UM. So there's other indicators out there that suggests um that the fundamentals of the labor market are still quite strong. Gets it is definitely a mixed picture because you've seen a lot of weakness in manufacturing numbers. Uh this you know, it isn't across the board. If you manufacturing a weak spot,
a strong dollar, etcetera. Although the services component of this job report is troubling because services in a normal month, services jobs are up at least hundred and fifty thou this latest month, private services up only around seventy thousand, so that seems to be troubling. And another thing, the hours worked actually pulled back a bit that correlates with GDP. That's another sign of perhaps a slowdown. Something hit the economy in May. But I take your point, maybe it
tause it's been so strong now it's slowing down. I think that ours work remained flat. It was something that I remained flat at thirty four point four hours on as the average link of the work week. It was that's the same as it was a month ago, which is something that I track closely because exactly what you're talking about. One thing that you we wouldn't want to see is ours declining and a week job jobs numbers
because that can indicate larger softness. And so the fact that ours remained sort of in the band we've been seeing in the recovery. UM there's somewhat down from where they were a few months ago, but in May had bedn't declined further, and so UM actually thought of that as an encouraging sign that we, you know, hours held on even though the job numbers were some of the lok okay hid Thank you so very much for joining us chief economists of the Labor Department. Hey, there's a
red hot sticky out. Turns out that there's a minority stake in Lebron's Cleveland clavind leers to be said to be for sale. I mean, is that because they lost last night to the Golden State Warriors will find out this is wimbed radio coming off. On taking stock, Will the Federal Reserve race interest rates in June or July after these week employment figures for May or will they wait until September. That's next on taking stock