The final monthly jobs report of 2023, released Friday, reveals that U.S. employers added 216,000 jobs in December — a sign of resilience in the nation’s economy in the face of a spike in interest rates.
WTOP anchors Shawn Anderson and Anne Kramer spoke to Mark Hamrick, senior economic analyst for bankrate.com, about what Americans can expect for the economy in 2024.
The transcript below has been lightly edited for clarity.
Anne Kramer: Happy Friday to you, Mark. Elaborate on today’s report, if you will, for us, please, for December.
Mark Hamrick: Good to be with you, Shawn and Anne. I think the job market continues to display resilience. But that’s within the context of something that we’re familiar with this time of year in the DMV, and that is cooling. However, this latest report, like the broader environment, a little warmer than has been seen of late. And so we added 216,000 jobs on the month, that’s a little better than expected. We had downward revisions for the previous two months. So that’s sort of, you know, takes some of the shine off that otherwise positive picture and the unemployment rate remains at 3.7%. So still pretty darn low.
Shawn Anderson: Any other caveats you might be finding about where things stand right now?
Mark Hamrick: Well, I think it’s about the outlook at this point, Shawn. And so we just published a series of stories on bankrate.com about our quarterly economist survey. And among the findings there is that the economists collectively expect that the pace of hiring in 2024 will be about one-third of the level of what we saw last year. And so that’s a rather significant slowdown. At the same time, they see unemployment rising into the low 4% range. And they put the risk of a recession, with 100% being a certainty and zero being not going to happen, really in the middle at 45%. And so those risks are still elevated. But you can say that we’ve avoided that so far this year. And the thing that, as we all know, most Americans want to be cured of is inflation. And we’re still talking about prices that are nearly 20% above pre-pandemic levels. So the job market picture is one that remains positive, but people are still irritated and feel like they’re being robbed by inflation.
Anne Kramer: Mark, the job market plays into how the Fed thinks about interest rates. How might the numbers today actually impact that?
Mark Hamrick: They have a meeting at the end of the month, and next week, we’ll be talking about the latest readings of inflation. So we’ll see what those look like. They’re expected to come in, roughly speaking, at a year-over-year increase of about 3%. The Fed’s target is 2%. So they’re not there yet. And the minutes released from the meeting that we had last month indicate that Federal Reserve officials are not yet dedicated to the proposition that rates should be coming down very soon. And I think right now the best bet for that is to look for a rate cut perhaps in the middle part of the year.
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