Chao Deng

Healthcare and social assistance jobs continue to power the overall job gains.

We saw healthcare add 54,000 jobs in April.

One surprise was the retail sector.

We saw jobs there in super centers and warehouse clubs.

Broadly speaking, jobs are coming through in more sectors than just healthcare.

Right.

For a long time, the Federal Reserve has wondered whether it needs to keep cutting interest rates to support what appears to be a shaky labor market.

Now that we've had this strong report, I think it puts more focus on the inflation data, which we'll see next week from the Labor Department for the month of April.

We know inflation is drifting up instead of down because of tariffs and also because of the effects of the Iran war.

And so I think we're going to see the Fed focusing increasingly on that.

Even before this report came out, Fed Chairman Jerome Powell was warning that

there could be potential distortions and really playing down the data.

Well, there was a government shutdown that lasted to mid-November that prevented the Labor Department from collecting

some of the data that they normally would have to compile the report.

So even going into today's release, economists were warning that some of the technical workarounds the agency had to use meant that the November figure might be biased a bit downwards.

Because the Labor Bureau wasn't able to collect data in October,

Economists think that they made this assumption that housing costs didn't move much that month.

And because the housing component composes a big part of the headline inflation, that workaround could have put downward pressure on the headline inflation reading.

And then because the government shutdown lasted through November 12th, at that point, when the labor statistics officials came back to survey data, it was right around Black Friday and Thanksgiving where you traditionally see a lot of holiday discounting.

And so, again, some of the numbers collected could have been distorted by that.